Implementing Atmel QTouch with Altium Designer Increasingly, I am being asked how to go about designing a touch application using Atmel's QTouch technology. I’ve also had a lot of people ask if it’s possible to develop such an application on a NanoBoard® 3000. Well it certainly is, and I thought I would take a moment and map out the overall aspects and options of implementing an Atmel QTouch design, including development. With Altium Designer® 10, we introduced support for the automatic Read Article ODB++ vs. Gerber X2 vs. IPC-2581: PCB Production File Format Wars There's been a lot of excitement among PCB Designers and Fabricators over the last year about new PCB design and manufacturing hand-off. People tend to fall into one of four camps: Stay with Gerber RX-274X (the status quo), stay with / switch to ODB++ (Mentor's format), adopt the upgraded Gerber X2, or adopt the new IPC-2581 standard. No matter which camp you fall into, one things really clear - most of the scrap, wasted time, and manufacturing Read Article Multi-board design projects in Altium Designer I was working with a customer recently who had two PCBs that were related. In this multi-circuit boards design project he wanted to work from a single schematic package, yet have a subset of the schematics populate two different printed boards. It’s enough of a scenario, and it’s reasonably simple to achieve in Altium Designer®. Here’s how. At the time of publishing, Altium currently supports only one PCB per PCB Project. In other words, each PCB Read Article Collaborative Design Part 3: Crossing the ECAD/MCAD Bridge Interfacing between electrical and mechanical design software is one of the most important forms of design collaboration in modern electronic design. As PCBs become smaller and more dense, and as mechanical housing restrictions become tougher, there is a great need for seamless design data transfer. For the third installment in this blog series, we'll take a look at some of the options available for crossing the boundary between electrical and Read Article Is Your Company Data as Secure As Pictures of Your Food? Consumer products such as smartphones carry priceless data of sentimental value and accordingly service providers offer backup services for their customers. In the business world, our data too is priceless in it's own way, in a way where it's much easier to attach a dollar amount to the value. So what are you doing to ensure your valuable data is taken care of? Every piece of data on my iPhone is automatically backed up. Your company data is Read Article Collaborative Design Part 2: Building a Better System The effectiveness of design collaboration is mostly determined by the structure and organization of the system back-end. For the second part of this blog series, we'll take a look at the best structure and practices for version control, and how this really forms a good basis for collaboration. Enter in the lifecycle management and enhanced administrative functionality of a real design release, and you have an even better foundation. From my Read Article How to use Schematic CAD for Harness Drawings and Cable Assemblies: Part 4 Sainesh Solanki continues his blog series on using Schematic CAD tools for cable and wiring harness design. In this 4th installment, Sainesh discusses how to clearly lay out the cable assembly drawing on the schematic page, along with the electrical schematic for generating a netlist for testing and DRC later on. Read on to find out how you can be using schematic CAD drawings for cable assemblies. Doing the cable assembly drawing in a Printed Read Article How to Route DDR3 Memory and CPU fan-out It's becoming more and more inevitable that board designers have to do high edge rate (high speed) PCB designs when working with microcontrollers. With the power of CPU's like the Freescale iMX6 multi-core ARM device family, but at very low "cost per MIP", it's more and more desirable to use devices like this to enable rich software and user experiences in your product. But using these super-micro added memory controller bears with it the Read Article Using Configuration Management to Reduce Design Errors and Promote Re-use: Part 1 A Configuration Management system can be used, along with an existing Design Data Management system, to further promote good data integrity. So just what is Configuration Management, and how can the general principles be applied to an electronic design environment? This blog series aims to answer some of the questions surrounding this topic, as well as provide a basic framework for easily integrating a useful Configuration Management system. A [a Read Article How to use Schematic CAD Drawings for Cable Assemblies: Part 2 The need to design cable assembly drawings often falls to the electronics design team, but for many, the use of high-cost dedicated cabling design software is simply out of reach and overkill. In this second installment of the cable design blog series, Sainesh Solanki reveals the needed design elements of the components used in great cable assembly drawings (you can access part 1 here). These schematic symbols and their associated parameters and Read Article How to use Schematic CAD Drawings for Cable Assemblies: Part 1 The need for computer-aided cable assembly drawings often falls to the electronics design team, but for many, the use of high-cost dedicated cable design software is simply out of reach and overkill. The solution? Use the Schematic Editor! Most electronic engineers work on products that require Printed Circuit Board designs to be interconnected by cable assemblies. As you might have already noticed, some dedicated tools that primarily focus on Read Article Putting managed content to the test The release of Altium Live along with the Shanghai and Hobart managed content services marks a significant shift in the way electronic product development should be done. The concept of managed content services using cloud publishing is new to our industry - I mean, it has been sort-of tried before by others but never successfully executed. I believe we now have the right solution. At this time, as more and more users connect to AltiumLive and Read Article Practical Steps to Create Embedded Side-Emitting LEDs in a PCB Embedded PCB cavities can be used along the edge of a PCB to provide side access to components, such as LEDs. Read Article How to download and install AD10 when using proxy servers The latest version of Altium Designer® 10 can be installed directly from the Software section of AltiumLive. However, your computer’s network settings, particularly the use of proxy servers, can sometimes cause problems with the install process. Here’s how to find out if you’re likely to have proxy server issues and how to work around them. The latest version of Altium 10 can be installed directly from the Software section of AltiumLive. However Read Article A Cloudy Focus There’s been some discussion on our new Forum about our plans for “all this cloudy stuff”. Some of you have asked why we have this focus. Some have questioned why we’re bothering when we can’t “even fix the so-and-so bug in the so-and-so editor in Altium Designer® ”. I think our response to this is to remind everyone that this is not about the software, but about what you do with it. It’s not about AltiumLive, but how you exploit AltiumLive Read Article Improving support for users - and investing in support AEs Many of you who’ve contacted Altium’s North American support team over the past two years may have noticed some changes. Notably, there were times when it was hard to get a live body on the other end of the phone, although generally once you did the advice you got was solid. For those users who resorted to emailing the team or logging a case through the support center (feel free to continue this practice), the wait time for a response could get Read Article What's in a Name - Component Code Development Part 2 In this blog, I outline how Altium Designers Content Team names printed circuit board (PCB) components, symbols, and footprints. This seems like an eminently boring place to start, but something I’ve noticed is that figuring out a way to name circuit board components in engineering land often makes for an animated discussion. Parametric information about the component is elevated to the row in the cmplib. This gives us the freedom to name the Read Article Pagination First page « First Previous page ‹‹ Page210 Current page211 Page212 Page213 Page214 Page215 Next page ›› Last page Last » Load More
