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New designers who graduate from a 2-layer board into a 4-layer board are probably ready to start working with power and ground planes, and there is a standard stackup most fabricators will give you to help build out your design. The basic stackup you’ll often see recommended is a SIG/GND/PWR/SIG type stackup, where the internal layers are planes or large polygons. For many types of designs, this is just fine as long as you don’t make some simple...

Imagine if you could design your circuit board, run simulations, source your parts, generate an accurate BOM, generate your output files and simply press a “send to manufacturing” button all within your design environment? While that may sound like a far-off dream, this interview with Misha Govshteyn from MacroFab will give you insight into how they are partnering with Altium to make this dream a reality very soon. Judy Warner: Misha, please...

In a previous article, I provided a discussion and some simulation results on the necessary clearance between impedance controlled traces and nearby grounded copper pour. What we found was that, once the spacing between the pour and the trace becomes too small, the trace becomes an impedance-controlled coplanar waveguide (with or without ground). We also saw that the 3W rule for the spacing between the trace and the grounded copper pour is a bit...

Differential pairs provide a novel way to route high data rate bitstreams, where each edge transition generally has a very fast rise time. Differential protocols used in high-speed designs are the mainstay of many common signaling standards with familiar acronyms. USB, HDMI, Ethernet, and many more are all routed as differential pairs and will require careful trace design and routing. In the past, this require making many manual corrections to...

Many of the PCB layout and routing guidelines in use today, even for moderate speed signals and devices, are meant to ensure signal integrity. If you’re new to PCB design and you’ve never experienced signal integrity problems, the concept of ensuring signal integrity in a design might seem esoteric. Modern PCBs can experience many problems that can be solved or prevented with some simple layout practices. Signal integrity practices focus on...

In this webinar, we will see how easy it is to migrate SolidWorks PCB designs and libraries data into Altium Designer and Altium 365. How to take advantage of Altium’s cloud based data management system to share and collaborate on data on a centralized server. As well as establishing ECAD - MCAD collaboration with your MCAD system on the highest level. This will allow you to seamlessly continue with all the work you did with your previous system...

ISM bands (industrial, scientific, and medical) are parts of the RF (radio-frequency) spectrum reserved for general use by, as the name suggests, scientific, medical, and industrial devices. Their creation was in response to specific demands by these industries for access to the RF spectrum to perform functions without having to compete with the traditionally intensive users of RF, the communications, and defense sectors. The critical thing to...

With Altium 365 Interactive Commenting, your comments provide you instant access and complete visibility to any design changes, so your explanations are all in one place. How is it useful? Different users can collaborate in real-time, in a chat-like, conversational format. Specific contextual annotations on your design can be collected. Conversations are never lost or misplaced since everything is tracked through Altium 365 and backed up in...

Like it or not, your PCB might encounter electrostatic discharge (ESD) events during its lifetime. ESD protection is more important for circuits that are meant to interface with the physical environment. Such a circuit may have a connector for external communication which is not safeguarded against static electricity, or it’s not electrostatically protected, which could lead to component failures during an ESD event. Normally, static electrical...