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When you need to prepare a new design for manufacturing, one of the important docuements you'll need to produce at scale is a PCB fabrication drawing. This drawing shows all of the important information that workers on the line will need to understand the construction of a PCB. A fabrication drawing does more than show an image or rendering of the fabricated board, it also tells the fabrication house all of the requirements the fabricated PCB...

Standard assembly drawing applications are not designed for creating drawings specifically for electronic assemblies. Printed circuit boards have complex features and placements that are not easy to render in most drafting applications, so significant time may be required to create these drawings. Something faster is needed to quickly create a production-grade drawing your assembly house can use to build your PCB. The Draftsman feature in Altium...

October 2021 VOL. 5 No. 4   Full Article | Watch Video | Brain Food Design to Manufacturing with a Single Mouse Click Imagine if you could design your circuit board, run simulations, source your parts, generate an accurate BOM, generate your output files and...

In November, the number of people using Altium 365 reached 17,000! With the platform gaining a critical mass, we decided to start a periodic newsletter and a blog series to keep our users informed about the latest developments. Check out what's new and the latest development on Altium 365. Schematic Compare Compare logical differences between versions of schematics without the noise of graphical changes that do not affect connectivity. Thi...

Systems that operate with high currents or high voltages carry a unique set of challenges that are not seen in smaller digital systems. Operators could be exposed to unsafe conditions, and designs could fail due to heat or electrostatic discharge. However, the right PCB design decisions can help reduce the risks involved in interacting with power electronics. In this guide, we’ll look at some of the basic design points to be considered in high...

Noise on power supply lines can be a significant headache, adversely affecting devices’ performance, causing reliability issues, and leading to unexpected system behavior. When designing an electrical device, the designer needs to consider two questions. How will my device behave if there is excessive noise on its input power supply? Can my device create noise that can affect other devices using the same power supply? Noise generally comes in...

In an earlier blog, I discussed some of the basic points in preparing routing rules for 2-layer PCBs to support routing and layout with digital signals. In particular, we looked at some of the basic stackup and routing rules needed to support a digital interface like I2C or SPI on a 2-layer PCB. When working with these interfaces, a few simple guidelines can help ensure signal integrity in your board and cut down on EMI. What about an impedance...

In this article, I’m going to guide you through the standard ferrite core selection and design process used in applications such as a DC-to-DC converter or a power filter inductor. The process involves a sequence of steps requiring the use of several data sheets and, should the ferrite core inductor design need to be gapped, some degree of iteration. These are the stages of ferrite core selection and inductor design we'll go through: Stage...

One of the most common points of failure of a device, especially when prototyping occurs even before you start to layout your circuit board. Mistakes in your schematic design can easily make their way all the way into prototypes or production without a second thought once the layout starts. In many companies, design reviews are performed to approve a schematic design to proceed with the layout - whether the schematic engineer is the layout...