PCB Design Resources and Information

Explore Altium's Resource hub to discover content from blog posts and design guides to technical white papers, all gathered together for your convenience and written by Altium's community of PCB design experts.

Documentation • Training • Webinars • Livestreams • Education / Student Programs • Support • Altium Academy

What is Schematic Capture? All designs start with creating schematic sheets for your circuits. Learn more about what is schematic capture in our guide for new engineers. Read Article

Switching Power Supply Filter Design When optimizing your filter performance, it is important to choose your components wisely. This article will serve as your comprehensive guide, read now. Read Article

Power Supply Filtering Options This article will help PCB designers identify the filter requirements, select the best options and locate the optimum places within the circuit design to incorporate filtering. Read Article

Pi Filter Designs for Power Supplies In this article, Expert Mark Harris will be looking at the low-pass filter arrangement. He will cover basic principles all the way to design constraints. Read now to learn more. Read Article

Mechanical and Electrical Design Come Together With Altium’s MCAD CoDesigner Electronics designers working in small design houses or in large enterprises often encounter a common set of challenges when interfacing with mechanical designers. For many new products, the mechanical form factor requirements will constrain the electrical design in terms of physical layout, location of interfaces, and component selection. For many electronic products, flex and rigid-flex board designs require careful modeling of the mechanical Read Article

What is the Difference Between ECAD and MCAD Software? Mark Harris gives us an introduction to the difference between ECAD and MCAD software in this article. Use the best PCB design software for ECAD/MCAD integration. Read Article

How to Use Ferrite Beads, Chips, Cores, and Plates Are you using ferrite beads correctly in your PCB layout? Learn more about all the different uses for ferrites in your PCB. Read Article

High-Power Output Power Supply Design Everything you need to know when designing high-power electronic devices. From traces, components, and thermal management, expert Mark Harris got it covered. Read this article to learn more. Read Article

SMPS PCB Layout Guidelines in Altium Designer We’ve got the SMPS PCB layout guidelines you need for power regulation in Altium Designer. Read Article

Sub-25 Micron Traces with Averatek ASAP Technology High-density designs, simplified. Averatek offers a disruptive solution for complex electronic design. In this episode, we are very fortunate to have the powerhouse executive team from Averatek Corporation. Watch or listen on the go. Read Article

Designing a 4 Layer PCB Stackup With 50 Ohm Impedance Your 4-layer PCB stackup with 50 Ohm impedance will constrain your trace width to sit within a specific range of values. Read Article

Efficient Battery Power Supply Design Expert Mark Harris tackles some important pointers to improve your electronics design’s battery efficiency. Read Article

An Overview of Power Supply Design Prevent potential problems from incorrect power supply design. This article talks about PCB power supply design guidelines and tips. Read Article

An Overview of Dual Power Supply Design In this article, you will learn about the numerous types and configurations for designing PCB with a dual power supply. Mark Harris included bonus design tips. Read Article

AC to DC Power Supply Design Mark Harris, an expert PCB designer gives us some pointers to keep in mind when designing your AC to DC power supply. Read it now. Read Article

EMI Shielding Techniques You Can Use in Your PCB Design Software Electromagnetic interference (EMI) is such a problem that governments around the world have placed limits on the amount of EMI an electronic device is allowed to generate or receive. Your electronic device needs to be designed to prevent unintentional radiation and suppress conducted noise up to a very high frequency value. This is not a simple matter of adding filtering on every circuit in your PCB layout, it’s about considering the entire Read Article

Designing for the FPGA Pin Mapper It is a well-known fact that FPGA IO names must meet specific syntax requirements in Verilog or VHDL. The naming convention used in Altium Designer schematics doesn’t always meet these criteria specified by the hardware description languages (HDL). As a result, there can often be a mismatch between PCB net names and the actual FPGA signal names. As more users experiment with the FPGA Pin Mapper tool in Altium Designer, they will discover that the Read Article