Implementing Touch Sensors Learn how to design a reliable alternative to traditional mechanical switches with capacitive touch sensor technology in Altium Designer. Capacitive touch sensor technology offers an inexpensive and highly reliable alternative to the traditional mechanical switches that are used in electronics control interfaces. Manually creating or resizing a touch sensor’s complex vendor/technology- specific patterns can be both difficult and time-consuming Read Article Area Sensitive Part Of The Board It’s that phase of the project when you’re about to hand over a development released product to production. From the development perspective, everything, from designs, parts, models, BOMs, and documentation, are all in their release state. It’s a time that calls for a true celebration after weeks of sleepless nights to finish the design on time and within budget. Then you get the flash back with few what-if questions; did sourcing get the new Read Article Streamlining the Altium Designer User Experience Learn how to streamline your Altium Designer experience with shortcut keys, pcb workflow automation, and a customizable workspace. Modern CAD tools employ an ever growing collection of features and functionality. One of the leaders in this area is Altium Designer, which provides users with a single, unified package that includes Schematic capture, PCB layout, Native 3D PCB, Signal Integrity, SPICE simulation, Embedded Software development, and Read Article Breaking the Visual Barrier How many PCB design hours have you wasted trying to decipher a legacy project you just inherited? How about wading through thousands of connection lines, trying to determine the best component placement? It can be disheartening, to say the least. Fortunately, there’s a better way. Let’s take a look at how you can use Net Color overrides to provide visual enhancements for both the schematic and PCB, to give you visual control over your design Read Article Top 10 DFM Problems That Affect Every Design Learn how to prevent the top 10 Design for Manufacturability (DFM) issues in your next PCB design project with these strategies. As a PCB designer, you manage a variety of different requirements and expectations.There are electrical, functional, and mechanical aspects to consider. In addition, the PCB has to be produced in a timely manner, with the best possible quality, at the lowest possible cost. And through all of these requirements, you also Read Article Simplify Routing With Pin, Part, And Diff-Pair Swapping When placing parts for a PCB design, the placement often leads to connections that will cross over each other. Although vias to other layers or slightly longer trace routing can be used to address a small number of crossover connections, a large number of crossovers, like those in the figure below, can make routing extremely difficult and time consuming. For more complex routing with larger numbers of crossovers, PCB designers typically employ Read Article The Final Step: Online Design Rule Check PCB designers begin with a set of physical requirements and specifications regarding the board layout. Certain factors such as the clearance between components and other primitives, establishment of electrical connection, size requirements of traces and vias, are just a few of the requirements that must be followed when designing a PCB. The ever-increasing complexity of boards has made it nearly impossible to carry out this verification manually Read Article Snippets Part B: Linking Your Schematic and PCB Snippets The key to successfully linking circuitry on a single schematic sheet with circuitry in a PCB design, including the components and routing, is in the designation of the components. When creating the two mating snippets in the schematic and the PCB, you need to create unique designators for the components. This paper illustrates the key to success in linking the two schematic and Printed Circuit Board snippets together, and will make reuse of Read Article Hierarchical Schematic Designs: Organization Is Golden Save time and eliminate the headaches associated with multi-sheet design by using hierarchical multi-sheet schematic designs. To learn more about this topic please see the full solution - Hierarchical Schematic Designs: Organization Is Golden - at Altium.com. Read Article 3D PDF Capabilities Support Seamless Communication It’s difficult to communicate aspects of a printed circuit board design effectively, using only text and static images. This is especially true in today’s world of increasingly complex PCB design. However, the Altium Designer3D PDF flip book export capabilities take advantage of the native 3D format, as well as the ability to embed this format into PDF documents. Thisexport format grants users the ability to share a fully-rendered, interactive, 3D Read Article PCB Importers: Import Wizard One task that has always proven difficult is moving electronic product designs from one design environment to another. Whether you’ve changed design tools or acquired designs from another company, there are a number of challenges involved in moving a project from one software platform to another, while maintaining design consistency. It’s a difficult and time-consuming process, but it has to be done. INTRODUCTION If a PCB designer has a design in Read Article Designing For Testability (DFT) The overall cost to produce a completed printed circuit board PCB can be broken down into several basic categories: The cost of manufacturing the blank PCB, the cost of components, the assembly costs, and the cost of test. That last one, the cost of testing the completed board, can comprise as much as 25% to 30% of the total cost of producing the product. SUMMARY Designing for testability in a PCB design (DFT) is a critical step in the design for Read Article 3D Measuring in Altium Designer The Altium Designer PCB editor gives designers the ability to display their board in glorious 3D measuring. With the help of Microsoft DirectX, the PCB editor allows the complete visualization of printed circuit boards, completely loaded with all of their components. You can then view the loaded board, zoom in, rotate it, and thoroughly examine it in full, three-dimensional detail. You can view it from any angle or position that you choose, or Read Article 3D Modeling Has Changed Electronic Design Forever Learn how to easily ensure that your board fits its mechanical enclosure right the first time with Native 3D PCB editing capabilities. To learn more about this topic please see the full solution - BOM Customization and 3D Modeling - at Altium.com. Read Article Adopting Signal Integrity In Your High Speed Design Process With switching speeds in TTL and newer logic families being fast enough to process data at Mbps and Gbps data rates, high speed design techniques are now critical for nearly every PCB designer. As rise times in digital signals have become faster, designers must either make their interconnects shorter or devise some important design strategies to prevent signal integrity problems. Today’s engineers need a complete toolset for signal integrity Read Article How To Improve Your Productivity With Added Screen Real Estate In electronics design, there’s an inherent need to increase productivity whenever possible. To that end, electronics designers also tend to have an inherent affinity for technology that will help them to do that. They’re willing to invest money in the most up-to-date tools, training, and other bells and whistles, if it means saving time and money in the long run. However, there’s another area that’s often overlooked--and which doesn’t cost very Read Article The Basics of PDN for the PCB Designer When PCB designers hear the term “PDN”, or “Power Distribution Network”, it might conjure up notions of bode plots, black magic, and other mysterious, scary things. In reality, the goal of the PDN is as straightforward as are most of the PCB design aspects that affect PDN performance. In this paper we’ll explain the various aspects of most PDN designs and how the PCB design software can influence them. OVERALL GOAL: SUFFICIENT CURRENT AND VOLTAGE Read Article Pagination First page « First Previous page ‹‹ Page220 Current page221 Page222 Page223 Page224 Page225 Next page ›› Last page Last » Load More
