Home

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

Chris Carlson's Time Saving Tips for PCB Design Chris Carlson, Snr FAE at Altium and accomplished Electrical and Electronic Engineer shares the expertise of his 23-year career in development, documentation, manufacturing, application engineering, and customer support. According to an Aberdeen study, 61% of a designer’s time is spent doing non-direct, design-related activities, such as sourcing components, document control, and so much more. Chris is here to help you improve your efficiency and Read Article
Current Transformers: How To Project If you need to measure the current from an AC source, a current transformer can be a low cost, accurate option. You can find current transformers designed specifically for anything between 50/60Hz power line applications and much higher frequencies that are more suitable for industrial/scientific machinery or process monitoring. Current transformers are non-contact and non-invasive, meaning that you do not need to run AC power through your Read Article
PCB Core vs. Prepreg Material: What Designers Need to Know I sometimes get questions from designers that want to know more about the PCB material selection and manufacturing process. Although I’m not a manufacturer, it behooves designers to understand something about the materials they have available when working on a new project. One question I get is on the exact differences between PCB core vs. prepreg materials. The terms are sometimes used interchangeably, including by novice designers; I’ll admit I Read Article
Pin-Package Delay and Via Delay in High Speed Length Tuning The race is on to keep signals in sync Take a look at the inside of an integrated circuit package, and you’ll find a number of wires bonded to the semiconductor die and the pads at the edge of the component. In the electronics world, signals need to travel across these bond wires and pads before they hit a PCB trace. As you look around the edge of an IC, these bond wires all have different lengths, and they incur different levels of delay and Read Article
The Importance of Having A Modern PCB Manufacturing Data Format I recently posted a BLOG on Altium about the latest eSmart Factory in New Hampshire. Using the latest in State-of-the-Art machinery and processes, it can produce near-perfect complex multilayers and HDI substrates with extremely fine geometries in only a few days, and without ever being helped or touched by human hands, all while and emitting nothing to harm the environment—zero effluents. Digitization for the Smart Factory This technology will Read Article
The eSmart Factory Comes to PCB Fabrication We all talk about the Industrial Revolution. The world has gone through a number of “Industrial Revolutions” since the creation of steam power in England. In fact, we talk about three such revolutions since that first one. In the early 2010s, the German Government proposed a fourth industrial revolution they called INDUSTRU 4.0. Today we also call it “The Smart Factory”! But, to date, there hasn’t been too much reported progress in this program Read Article
Can You Hear Me Now? Depending on your background and personal experiences, two things may spring to mind when you hear the term “cocktail party problem.” The first is you thinking, “there are never enough cocktails to satisfy everyone’s requirements,” but maybe I’m projecting again. Alternatively, you may be considering how difficult it is for an artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled voice-controlled assistant like Amazon’s Alexa to follow individual voices when a Read Article
Design for Additive Manufacturing with Your ECAD/MCAD Software Your next set of advanced PCBs will roll off your 3D printer with these Design for Additive Manufacturing guidelines Industry 4.0 is surely on the horizon, and with the rate at which technology advances, many advanced products will be 3D printed in part or in full. The industrial IoT paradigm is already transforming the way many manufacturers operate and is helping usher innovation in a number of advanced industrial and consumer products. The Read Article
PCB Leakage Current and Breakdown in High Voltage Design Ohm’s law: it’s a wonderful tool we have for analyzing all types of circuits. This simple relation applies to so many devices that it’s quite easy to explain many aspects of component behavior with this single equation. With high voltage PCBs, however, we have to use other tools in addition to Ohm’s law to understand some important aspects of circuit behavior. Bring in Paschen’s law and Kirchoff’s laws, and you have everything you need to Read Article
Flexible Circuit Designs with Large or Heavy Components One of the primary benefits of using a flexible circuit versus a rigid PCB board or wire and cable is the savings in weight and space. Flexible materials are thin, extremely light weight, and allow you to package in 3D, bending and folding to make necessary connections, allowing you to shrink the overall package size or fit additional electronics in a similarly-sized unit. As an example, a very typical two-layer construction for a flexible Read Article
48V to 3.3V Regulator Design Project Recently, I have been working on a 300W LED panel project. I’ve already written an article about building a 65W LED driver, and another about simulating it on PDN analyzer. However, there are some features I still want to implement, one of which is wireless dimming capability on the panels. Wireless dimming is important because getting the perfect balance of light is difficult when you have to keep pulling a light down from the top of a tall pole Read Article
Design Philosophy in Printed Electronics In printed electronics, I think about design philosophy from a new perspective. My question about design philosophy is related to printed electronics manufacturing: do I optimize my layout for electrical performance or manufacturability, which may then mean compromises for electrical characteristics? In printed electronics design I need to make trade-offs between trace resistance, voltage levels, power consumption, and layout area. With proper Read Article
Conception multi-canaux avec un projet plat Download PDF
Signal Integrity Evangelist Eric Bogatin, our Expert Insider to DesignCon 2020 Signal integrity expert, Dr. Eric Bogatin, joins us in this episode to talk about the upcoming DesignCon conference and expo that will be held in Santa Clara, CA January 28th through January 30th. Dr. Bogatin shares information about the presentations he’ll be giving; this includes a 2-part S-Parameter master class, speed training about understanding TDR measurements, and a session tackling tricks the experts use to get more out of their Read Article
There’s a Lot of Quantum About These Days It’s disconcerting to discover how much remains unknown at the quantum level (Image source: pixabay.com) I just heard that China has developed the world’s first mobile quantum satellite communications station. At first, I didn’t know what to think about this news, but this is largely because I don’t understand “quantum.” Much of modern physics is based on two incredibly sophisticated and successful theories: general relativity and quantum Read Article
Virtual Reality + Waterpark = Awesomeness! Virtual reality snorkeling (Image source: screenshot from Wiegand Waterrides video) Almost every day, I'm exposed to an idea that stops me in my tracks and makes me say "Wow!" Just a few minutes ago as I pen these words, for example, my chum John in the UK (see also On Mushrooms, Socks, and Ducks) sent me an email containing naught but a link and a smiley face. Since I couldn’t do much with the smiley face, I clicked on the link, only to discover Read Article
Are Drone Deliveries on the Radar? How long will it be before delivery drones fill the skies? Image source: paxabay.com I love reading science fiction books and watching science fiction movies. This year I will be celebrating the 21st anniversary of the 21st anniversary of my 21st birthday (think about it), and it's amazing to me how many of the technology concepts I used to read about in my formative years -- literally the stuff of science fiction -- have come to pass, albeit not Read Article