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Explore content from blog posts to technical white papers gathered together for your convenience. All written by Altium's community of PCB design experts.

Isolated USB Connection Project While working heavily with microcontroller projects in the past, I learned that computer USB ports can be fragile things. Simply shorting dozens of volts across the port just kills them dead—and there are so many other creative ways to destroy USB functionality on a motherboard! I’ve seen USB isolation devices on the market which solve precisely these sorts of problems (developers doing bad with their devices), however, I never really got around Read Article

Regroupez les composants dans des chabres pour un routage plus efficace Download PDF

Ben and Judy 2019 Wrap-Up Welcome the year-end wrap with Ben Jordan, where we’ll discuss routing engines, RF and microwave and high-speed design, and how they differ. We’ll talk about signal integrity, and discuss what 2020 and beyond will hold for design. And lastly, we’ll share some resources and links as our holiday gift to you. Listen to the Podcast: Download this episode (right click and save) Watch the video: Show Highlights: The recent launch of Altium Designer 20® Read Article

SoC FPGA Boasts RISC-V Processor Well, the current "hot off the press" (don’t burn your fingers") news is that the folks at Microchip Technology have just unveiled the details regarding their forthcoming PolarFire SoC FPGA family boasting a hardened real-time, Linux-capable, RISC-V-based microprocessor subsystem. If you are "in the know," you should be jolly excited by now. On the other hand, there's so much going on these days that it's easy to let things fall through the Read Article

Optimizing Power Consumption Power efficiency—energy efficiency if you’re a purist—has become perhaps the highest-profile aspect of system design. This is especially true for IoT applications where a device may need to operate for years on harvested energy or a cell battery. Thus, a critical stage of design is power optimization. Typically, the first stage of power optimization is setting the power budget. For example, the system spec might state that the device has to be Read Article

65W Single IC LED Driver Project One of the projects I’m working on for personal use at the moment is a high color rendering index (CRI) LED panel, which I’m aiming to make about 300W. I was exploring options for making a high performance LED driver that would be quite compact, and while I couldn’t build a 300W single IC LED driver, I was able to design a 65W one that didn’t look like it would melt right through the circuit board. I really liked the IC, so I thought I’d create a Read Article

Continuous Manufacturing Volume As a manufacturing term, it can mean different things, depending upon the industry. Volume production for an automotive OEM means hundreds of thousands of units. For an industrial CNC manufacturer, lifetime sales over decades might be in the tens of thousands. For many small design companies, producing even “low” volumes may be a manufacturing challenge. It takes success to be able to invest in infrastructure that supports higher volumes Read Article

Substrate Integrated Waveguide Routing for mmWave PCBs A substrate integrated waveguide acts similar to optical fibers The applications of mmWave signals used to be confined to defense, but now mmWave systems are becoming more common. You can thank car radar, UAV radar, upcoming rollouts of 5G, and current research on 6G for bringing mmWave technology into the mainstream. Routing with mmWave signals has forced designers to rethink their routing practices and interconnect designs. This has motivated Read Article

Parasitic Extraction with an Electromagnetic Solver in PCB Routing Keep your signals synchronized with parasitic extraction in your PCBs Parasitic extraction: the integrated circuit design community must grapple with this task on a delay basis, especially once gate features are reduced below ~350 nm and chips run at high switching rates. The PCB community also has to deal with this idea in order to better design power delivery networks, interconnects with extremely precise impedance, and properly quantify Read Article

PCB Bus Routing and Layout: The Basics Power supply on a network switch Modern computing simply wouldn’t be possible without PCB bus routing and layout. The same goes for many digital systems that manipulate data in parallel. If you’re working on a new PCB design and you need to route a bus between different devices, there are some simple rules to follow to ensure your signals aren’t distorted and that successive devices are triggered correctly. As some designers may question the Read Article

High Speed Routing Guidelines for Advanced PCBs You can create this advanced board with these high speed routing guidelines for advanced PCBs Newer designs are continuing to get faster, with PCIe 5.0 reaching 32 Gb/s, and PAM4 pushing signal integrity and speeds to the limit. Proper interconnect design must account for the lower noise margins of advanced devices, impeccable power stability requirements, and much more to ensure signals can be received properly. With advanced devices running at Read Article

MIPI Physical Layer Routing and Signal Integrity MIPI physical layer routing (C-PHY) is typically used to connect these smartphone cameras to a processor. When most designers talk about routing standards, particularly for advanced devices, they typically refer to differential routing standards (e.g., LVDS) that enable high data rates. These signaling standards have proliferated computers, networking equipment, smart electronics, and other areas, and they have been critical for operating with Read Article

Leveraging Component Data to Build Better Design’s Faster In the business of robust electronics design, it’s not enough to build something that works, or even something that works well. Working phenomenally is the bare minimum in a competitive landscape. A robust design at a holistic level is one that is made of the correct components for the application, all of which are readily available with alternates, that is price optimized and sourceable from multiple suppliers. That’s a tall order for a design Read Article

Simberian’s 3D Field Solver in Altium Designer Simberian makes a physics-based 3D field solver tool that helps measure not only the traces on your board but also the materials. Altium recently entered into a formal partnership with Simberian, and Roger Paje - VP of Global Marketing, discusses with us how this impacted Altium Designer® 19 and 20, and what’s we’ll see going into Altium Designer 21 and beyond. Listen to the Podcast: Download this episode (right click and save) Watch the video Read Article

Webinar on XR | Think AR on Steroids Making the business case for XR (Image source: XR Intelligence) Do you remember when the internet first reached the popular consciousness with the release of the MOSAIC web browser circa 1993? A couple of years later, even though almost everyone was aware of the internet by that time, many companies -- including large, multibillion-dollar concerns -- were still debating internally whether it was worth spending their time and resources on having Read Article

8-Bit Micros are Alive and Kicking The NUCLEO-8S207K8 board boasts a 32-pin STM8S207K8 MCU (Image source: STMicroelectronics) I just heard from the guys and gals at STMicroelectronics (ST) that they are "making design starts using 8-bit STM8 microcontrollers (MCUs) faster, more affordable, and more accessible for creative minds of all types by introducing new development boards in the easy-to-use Nucleo-32 form factor." We will return to consider these little rascals in a moment Read Article

Rigid-Flex PCBs in IoT Devices: ECAD and MCAD Collaboration At a recent PCB manufacturer’s trade show, multiple fabricators informed me they are seeing many more requests for flex and rigid-flex PCBs recently, particularly for smart wearables and small embedded/IoT products. The advantages of flex and rigid-flex PCBs include more efficient use of space in an enclosure, and the ability to adapt to foldable devices. Whether you need a static or dynamic flex/rigid-flex PCB, you’ll need to verify a number of Read Article