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The most powerful, modern and easy-to-use PCB design tool for professional use

Altium Designer 20

The most powerful, modern and easy-to-use PCB design tool for professional use

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How Absorbing Conformal Coatings Affect Your PDN and Radiated EMI Signal integrity analysis and measurements go hand-in-hand I remember the first time I—back in my days of working with sensors—pumped nitrogen dioxide into a humid environmental chamber while evaluating a DUT. Over time, the surface of my copper leads slowly corroded as they sat unprotected in such a noxious environment. As my electronics experiment was living a double life as a chemistry experiment, I questioned whether to use a conformal Read Article

Power Integrity Measurements for Your Prototype Board We often write about signal integrity and power integrity around here, but there is one area where we sometimes fall short: test and measurement. Both aspects of building a new device are critical for ensuring your board will work as intended and meets stringent performance requirements. With advanced systems, the level of testing and measurements required to qualify a prototype for full-scale production spans far beyond using a multimeter. Power Read Article

29:12 Altium Designer 20 - Key Features Sneak Peek Are you ready to meet the next generation of Easy, Modern, and Powerful PCB design? Watch this live webinar to Watch Video

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OnTrack Newsletter: Altium Designer 20 Sneak Peek, Impedance Measurement, Food for Thought - November 2019 OnTrack Newsletter Nov. 2019 Vol. 3 No. 6 A First Look Inside Altium Designer 20 November marks the launch of Altium Designer 20, and we thought you’d be like to hear from a couple of Altium veteran “insiders” about what you can expect to see in this latest release. Lawrence Romine, VP of Corporate Marketing and Ben Jordan, Technical Marketing Director, Corporate (both engineers) share what their favorite new features are and which ones they Read Article

Follow Your Multilayer Ground Return Path to Prevent EMI Make sure none of these traces crosses a ground plane gap Following the path back to ground can quickly become complex in a complicated multilayer PCB. When your PCB has a small layer count (e.g., a 4-layer board with two plane layers), it becomes rather easy to determine the return path and deliberately design it to prevent EMI. The situation becomes more complicated when you’re working with higher layer counts. Multiple plane layers and Read Article

Driving Small DC Motors With Altium Designer In this article, we’re going to run through the actual implementation of a driver IC from schematic creation to PCB layout. You will find this project on GitHub, released under an open-source license if you simply want to grab it to copy and paste into your own design. Part Selection I have two small, high-speed motors that I want to drive, which will draw about 1 amp each under load, and I’ll need to run off a 30 volt power source in an Read Article

Problems in Multiboard BOM Generation? Unified Design Tools Can Help Dealing with a multiboard BOM can feel like shuffling stacks of paper... Your next multiboard system is likely complicated enough. You’ve got to worry about multiple layouts, multiple schematics, signal integrity within and between boards, mechanical form and function, and EMI/EMC. With all these design aspects to worry about, documenting every aspect of your board can be a time suck. With so many new products being built from multiboard systems Read Article

Signal Distortion in Your PCB: Sources and Solutions Length matching for high-speed signals is all about synchronization... Signal distortion often gets a passing mention in many discussions on signal integrity and circuit analysis. As more networking products start running at higher speeds and use complicated modulation schemes, you’ll find that signal distortion becomes a serious problem that contributes to bit error rates. Distortion sources are cited as one of the primary bottlenecks preventing Read Article

Electronics System-Level Design in Altium Designer Electronics system level design lets you focus on functionality and abstraction The day-to-day life of a PCB layout engineer is all about translating schematics into a real, manufacturable PCB. Before this can happen, designs begin at an abstract level that focuses on designing functionality. As the overall design process progresses, design requirements are made more granular, reaching the signal processing level and, eventually, the component Read Article

How to Create an Amplifier Simulation in Altium Designer Length matching for high-speed signals is all about synchronization... We’d all love to get to the test and measurement stage quicker. It means you’ve finally gotten through the design phase and you’re ready to test prototypes. It might also mean you’ve narrowed down to the components you need for your system and your evaluating proposed functionality for your system. Tests and measurements with your circuits are very important, but they won’t Read Article

The Basics of Signal Integrity Analysis in Your PCB Signal integrity analysis and measurements go hand-in-hand The basics of signal integrity analysis in your PCB can be anything but basic. Simulation tools are great for calculating the behavior of signals in different nets during schematic and layout design, but you’ll still need to take some steps to interpret the results. As advanced as some signal integrity and EM simulation tools can get, they simply can’t compare to the information you can Read Article

Push and Shove Router: How it Works and Why You Need It If you have a complex layout like the one shown above, and you need to move traces or vias around the board, what can you do to decrease your routing time? This is where the push and shove router feature in Altium Designer can be a huge help. Using this feature eliminates the need to reroute a large number of unselected traces as you adjust traces and vias in your layout. So when would you need to use something like this? Doesn’t this interfere Read Article

How to Choose an RGB LED Panel for Your Next Geppetto Project Billboards are just one application for RGB LED panels I remember the days where I would drive down the highway and see workers placing new graphics on billboards dotting the roadside. Now you hardly see this because so many billboards have gone digital. You can thank RGB LED panel display tiles for this, which allows multiple advertisements to share the same space and allows for some interesting animated advertisements. RGB LED panel displays Read Article

How to Add an RGB Matrix Display to Your Board in Geppetto Micro RGB Matrix Tile connected to the WiFi RGB LED Matrix board. When it comes to custom display applications, you may not need to go the route of including a large-scale LED or LCD display screen. For specialized or artistic lighting applications, you can benefit from a system that provides selectable color mixing and distribution across your lighting module. This is where an RGB matrix display is an ideal choice for your next lighting Read Article

Calculating your PCB Complexity & First Pass Yields There are four things I know about PCB yields—mathematically! PCB yields are not normally distributed. They are what is called GAMMA Distributed. Defects that produce low yields may be systemic and repeatable, others may be just random—but you can test for this. You can predict yields if you take the time to collect the data. Yields are such wonderful things! I wonder why we don’t write about them more. They are the dividing phenomena that often Read Article

Product Design Trends in 2020: Modular Hardware vs. Modular Software Containerization is a core concept in modular hardware and modular software Modular hardware design is everywhere and has been on the rise in the embedded world. The drastic rise of the Arduino and Raspberry Pi ecosystems has encouraged greater use of a modular architecture. Open-source hardware platforms are gaining momentum, particularly in single board computer design and development board design. When it comes to modular software, we are Read Article