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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.

Enclosures for Flex, Rigid-flex, and Multiboard Designs Use ECAD/MCAD Co-design for Your PCB Enclosure and Board Layout Printed circuit boards are fun to design and lay out, but a PCB will need an enclosure to hold it mechanically stable. PCB enclosures can be purchased off-the-shelf or they can be custom-designed in MCAD tools. No matter which route you take to create your enclosure, you’ll need to import your PCB layout into MCAD tools to ensure your board and components will not interfere with the enclosure. When you’re working with a complex layout, multiboard Read Article
How to Prepare Your Project for PCB Cart Manufacturing with Altium Designer How to Prepare Your Project for PCB Cart Manufacturing with Altium Designer The electronics industry is massive and there are plenty of PCB manufacturers to choose from for your next order. When you need to prepare your next board for fabrication and assembly, how can you quickly generate deliverables for manufacturers like PCB Cart? Instead of generating all manufacturing documentation manually, designers need an easy way to create deliverables for fabrication and assembly. If you plan to work with PCB Cart to produce Read Article
The Best High Voltage PCB Design Software Package The Best High Voltage PCB Design Software Package Of all the different boards a designer can create, a high voltage PCB design can be complicated and requires strict attention to safety. If not laid out correctly these boards can be safety hazards or can fail to function on first power up, leaving a designer with wasted time and effort. In the best case, the board will function reliably for a long period of time thanks to correct layout practices. When you’re planning your next high voltage PCB Read Article
Stay Productive When You Switch to Altium Designer Upgrade from AutoCAD PCB to Altium Designer's Unified Environment Most designers are familiar with AutoCAD for mechanical or construction drafting, and for making important engineering diagrams. Although AutoCAD is great for many tasks involved in electrical or mechanical engineering, PCB designers need more than mechanical drafting tools to make advanced electronics. To get your designs to the next level, you need the best set of ECAD tools on the market, rather than using the AutoCAD PCB package. If you’re Read Article
Use a PCB Gerber Viewer to Inspect Your Fab Files in Altium 365 Use a PCB Gerber Viewer to Inspect Your Fab Files in Altium 365 A PCB Gerber viewer can help you inspect your board as you prepare for manufacturing. Use the features in Altium 365 to compare and share your Gerber files. Read Article
PCB power plane current density How to Calculate PCB Power Plane Current Capacity Do you know how much current your power plane can accommodate? Learn more about PCB power plane current capacity in this article. Read Article
media independent interface ethernet links Decoding Media Independent Interface (MII) in Ethernet Links Learn about media independent interface variants for routing Ethernet links, including gigabit variants for 1 GbE and faster links. Read Article
Fostering Innovation in a Post-Covid World Fostering Innovation in a Post-Covid World What’s in your soft skill toolbox? Eli Hughes is a true full-stack hardware engineer and a co-founder of Tzero Brew. He joins the OnTrack podcast to share his insights on how to foster innovation, manage upstream failure, build trust with your fellow engineers and stakeholders, and develop your soft skills—and other non-technical skills we use to communicate with each other and solve problems effectively. Listen to the Podcast: Download this Read Article
Design Your Small Circuit Board in Altium Designer Design Your Small Circuit Board in Altium Designer Large circuit boards, small circuit boards, and anything in between might seem like they need separate sets of PCB layout features. In reality, your PCB design software shouldn’t delineate your PCB design based on size. Whether you need to design a large or small circuit board, a design application with high-quality CAD tools will help you get the job done quickly and prepare your board for production. Small circuit board designs are much easier Read Article
Working Through Circuit Simulation Free Often Won’t Work, Try Altium Designer Working Through Circuit Simulation Free Often Won’t Work, Try Altium Designer Electronic Design Automation (EDA) software provides the tools that support the design and analysis of electronic devices, systems, and printed circuit boards. Within this broad definition of EDA software, some companies offer free PCB design programs while others focus on schematic capture, mixed-signal simulation, Very Large-Scale Integration (VLSI) circuit design, and customizable design rule checking. While many EDA software applications Read Article
MCAD Collaboration in Altium Designer MCAD Collaboration in Altium Designer Having two different design teams working together on computer-aided design processes can be tough. You constantly have to share software files back and forth, keeping track of what’s been sent and what’s been received. Not only that, the circuit board design data you sent isn’t the design data you receive. You’re constantly dealing with the file formats of different domains. The worst issues come up when printed circuit changes have been made Read Article
photodiode circuit Designing and Simulating a Photodiode Circuit for Your PCB Your design tools should give you an easy way to create circuit diagrams, simulate electrical behavior, and start a new PCB layout. A photodiode circuit is important in many applications, ranging from simple ON/OFF light detection to receiving digital data in an optical fiber. These semiconductor devices are similar to a regular diode, but they can be difficult to simulate without the right component models and circuit design tools. With Altium Read Article
PCB transmission line calculator Utilizing a PCB Transmission Line Calculator Makes Design Easier PCB transmission line calculators are a dime a dozen, giving you the tools you need to calculate lossless impedance, lossless propagation delay, or simple things like DC resistance. These quantities are nice to know, but they don't tell you the whole story about your design. Online calculators are also known to give incorrect results when used for impedance calculations, especially because they cannot consider fundamental phenomena like Read Article
Use Supply Chain Tools in Altium Designer When You Need a PCB Cost Calculator Use Supply Chain Tools in Altium Designer When You Need a PCB Cost Calculator Anytime you need to prepare a new design and plan a production run, it’s important to work up an estimate for design, PCB fabrication, assembly, shipping, components, and any other portions of a project. There is a lot that goes into any project and it needs to be planned out early in order to prevent cost overruns. Some designers looking for manufacturing services and component prices might be tempted to use an online calculator, but this is Read Article
Altium’s Parameter Table Editor Lets You Control Your Project Settings Altium’s Parameter Table Editor Lets You Control Your Project Settings There’s a lot of data that goes into any PCB design project. The design files and project files all have their own parameters, and these can be customized to provide plenty of useful information for data management. ECAD software users need a simple way to keep their parameter sets organized within their project files, component libraries, and much more. Parameters can appear in all types of objects in your ECAD software, as well as in any type Read Article
Altium Designer Beats Any OEMSTrade Electronics Part Search Altium Designer Beats Any OEMSTrade Electronics Part Search Finding and sourcing new components for your design should be an easy process. Parts specifications can get very detailed, and there are many component options to browse through on the market. How can designers narrow down to the components they need and source components from authorized distributors? Using an OEMSTrade electronics part search and other distributor websites only gives you a partial view of the supply chain. Thanks to its Read Article
Build a Comprehensive Electronic Symbols Library in Altium Designer Build a Comprehensive Electronic Symbols Library in Altium Designer Electronic symbols are the basis for the CAD documents you’ll create before you prepare a circuit board layout. An electronic symbols library contains basic symbols and figures that are used in electrical drawings, and they need to be linked to the PCB footprints that will appear in your PCB layout. When you need to prepare and organize clear PCB layouts and electrical drawings, you need a reliable source of CAD symbols and PCB footprints, and it Read Article