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Let’s set the scene: you’ve just installed your new PCB design program and you’re ready to jump into your first PCB layout. What should you do to get started? Most engineers are excellent at working with schematics and selecting their core components, but someone who is new to PCB layout might find the process overwhelming. PCB design software contains a lot of tools and follows a specific workflow, but it’s possible for a beginner to move...

Design professionals talk a lot about design for manufacturing guidelines, but what exactly are these and how are they implemented in your PCB design software? In PCB development, design for manufacturing has a very simple meaning: you should only implement design choices if you can ensure they are manufacturable with maximum yield. This deceptively simple explanation leaves out a lot, and it’s natural to assume your fabricator can manufacture...

Front-End Engineering a PCB Product In the broadest application of the term, “front-end engineering” refers to an engineering design approach used to control project costs and thoroughly plan for a project. The PCB product development process refers to all the steps taken prior to the board being moved from the design to the fabrication process. This article will review those steps, define what happens in them and what the critical elements...

Somewhere below all the components in the above image is a PCB made from rigid stackup materials, and these materials must meet certain operating standards in order to meet basic performance needs. Something that many newer power electronics designers will do, including high voltage power systems designers, is to just request the default stackup from a fabricator and start creating the PCB layout immediately. This is a perfectly acceptable (and...

For those of you who pay attention to Altium’s Youtube channels, you know that signal integrity is a hot topic and it generates a lot of questions. I recently received an interesting question from a viewer that asked about terminating capacitive loads: I see there are a lot of great videos for impedance matching and designing the width of traces to match any incoming cable impedance, but what about matching capacitive loads? Current generation...

In this episode, Zach chats with Lawrence Romine, Altium’s VP of Marketing. AltiumLive 2022 Virtual Summit is fast approaching, and we wanted to deliver to you some important information and reasons why you should not miss it. Lawrence gives an exciting overview and details about AltiumLive 2022’s new immersive experience!  Listen to the Podcast: Download this episode ...

Designing is stressful enough unfortunately we now also have to worry about components constantly being out of stock or obsolete. Supplies and prices seem to change overnight and it's hard to keep up, but there is something you can do. Altium Designer’s ActiveBOM capability includes customizable BOM checks and integrates with IHS Markit to bring designers the most up-to-date component information. Check the status and verify all the components in...

Designing is stressful enough unfortunately we now also have to worry about components constantly being out of stock or obsolete. Supplies and prices seem to change overnight and it's hard to keep up, but there is something you can do. Altium Designer’s ActiveBOM capability includes customizable BOM checks and integrates with IHS MarkitⓇ to bring designers the most up-to-date component information. Check the status and verify all the components...

Designing is stressful enough unfortunately we now also have to worry about components constantly being out of stock or obsolete. Supplies and prices seem to change overnight and it's hard to keep up, but there is something you can do. Altium Designer’s ActiveBOM capability includes customizable BOM checks and integrates with IHS MarkitⓇ to bring designers the most up-to-date component information. Check the status and verify all the components...