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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.

Know the Bandwidth This article relates to both printed electronics and PCBs. I acquired my bandwidth design techniques working in PCB design, and later applied the same principles to my printed electronics design. In this article, I’ll explain my knowledge of bandwidth, and how I was able to apply it to both PCBs and printed electronics. Before going into details on bandwidth, I think it’s worth revisiting what we in electronics mean by the term “signal”. For me Read Article
Exploring Arduino is Now Expanded and Updated by Jeremy Blum The Altium OnTrack Podcast with Judy Warner welcomes one of the Hardware design community’s brightest stars, Jeremy Blum. Jeremy recently released a new version of his book that is a heavily expanded and updated edition. Exploring Arduino, has helped people around the world and now you can get a completely up-to-date version, which you can buy now. Jeremy is a two-time AltiumLive keynote speaker and has also been featured on this podcast twice Read Article
Routage de sortance BGA Download PDF
Polygone ou plan, comment choisir? Download PDF
PDN Analyzer Simulation of 65W Single IC LED Driver In my last article, I designed a 65W LED driver for powering a 36V LED string at 1.8A. The small MSOP-8 IC on it is going to get quite warm, which makes me believe the power distribution network is worth simulating with PDN Analyzer. This will allow me to see if there are any spots that need optimization on the board. Anywhere I can reduce the current density in high-current areas to ensure a lower copper temperature will be worth the time Read Article
Living on the Edge (Rate) — It’s All About Time and Distance The focus of this article is the clarify the origins of the phrase edge rate, what it really means relative to the design process and the best means for addressing it. Read Article
Reflecting on Your Design, Part 2, What Do Reflections Do to a Signal? In part 1 of this article, I described what transmission line reflections are, how they are created and what the resulting waveforms look like. This part of the article will discuss what reflections do to a signal. Figure 1 is a typical 5V CMOS driver driving a 50-ohm transmission line that is 12 inches or approximately 2 nanoseconds long. There is a CMOS receiver at the end of the line that is a tiny parasitic capacitor. For these purposes, it Read Article
Any Angle Routing: When Should You Use It? This is what any angle routing looks like... EDA tools have come a long way since the advent of personal computing. Now advanced routing features like auto-routers, interactive routing, length tuning, and pin-swapping are helping designers stay productive, especially as device and trace densities increase. Routing is normally restricted to 45-degree or right angle turns with typical layout and routing tools, but more advanced PCB design software Read Article
Image Processing Embedded Systems with Modular Hardware Image processing embedded systems can be deployed quickly thanks to modular design tools With advances in industrial automation, automotive technology, remote sensing, and much more, image processing is taking center stage in many embedded systems. Image processing with older video systems was difficult or impossible due to the low quality of many imaging systems with perpetual uptime. As a result, older camera systems could be developed for Read Article
The Shrinking Manufacturing Cycle Traditionally, an engineering cycle has been considered to be on the order of 18 months. That’s the time between generations of products, whether it’s a new processor or a new Internet appliance. Today, a company that operates on an 18-month cycle is considered slow within many industries. If you have a lot of competitors, their release cycles are likely out of phase from yours. For example, if there are three companies serving an application Read Article
Leveraging the Ecosystem Being a great designer requires discipline. Most designers love to create, and design is an end in and of itself. This is fine when you design as a hobby. After all, the point isn’t getting the project done more than it is to enjoy oneself. When you design as a business, this all changes. Usually there’s some sort of clock ticking, like you only have so much money saved up before your business needs to start generating some income to pay for Read Article
Using Low-Volume Runs to Eliminate High-Volume Failures “High volume” is a relative term. It depends upon what your business does and how many of a product you plan to sell. For one OEM, a minimum initial run might be 250K units. For another, 10K is the expected run of a product across its entire market life. One way to consider “high volume” is that it’s large enough to hurt your business if you make a mistake. Put another way, high volume is high risk. And given the stakes, you want to minimize this Read Article
Real-Prototyping World There’s something to be said about the difference between designing your system on an evaluation board compared to designing it using the board on which your system is actually going to ship. One of the problems with using an evaluation board is that it’s a really nice environment to work in. Too nice, in some respects. The processor company wants you to have a positive experience with their chip so the eval board has all the bells and whistles Read Article
Riding Technology Waves There’s tremendous value in being able to utilize the latest and greatest technology on the market. Of course, the leading edge is sharp and there are ways you can cut yourself if you aren’t careful. In general, though, having the flexibility to choose where you ride technology waves enables you to better balance the overall performance, cost, and power efficiency as you design systems. I remember an industrial embedded system I was optimizing Read Article
Quit Bouncing Around Bounce on a single-pole, double-throw (SPDT) switch with normally closed (NC) contact opening and normally open (NO) contact closing (Image source: David Ashton) In an earlier column -- Say "Hello" to the LogiSwitch Workbench -- I introduced a rather clever shield for the Arduino Uno. This little scamp allows you to break out all of the Arduino's analog and digital input/output (I/O) pins, along with the 5V, 3V3, and GND pins, to three full-size Read Article
All Hail the Evo Compute Module The Evo Compute Module (small board) mounted on an EvoTray (larger board) (Image source: Alorium Technology) I was just chatting with my chum Jason Pecor at Alorium Technology. We bounced around from topic to topic with the agility of much younger men. At some stage in our conversation, Jason mentioned a forthcoming product called the Evo Compute Module, which really grabbed my attention. I'll tell you all I know in a minute (it won’t take long) Read Article
Accelerating Board Bring Up There’s that moment when you power up the first production board for a new design. It doesn’t matter how perfectly the prototypes operated. The question, “Is it going to work?”, still hangs in the air. At its best, this process is exciting. At its worst, you find yourself with an intermittent but persistent problem that means you need to spend more time and money. Today, there are a great variety of off-the-shelf boards available to jumpstart Read Article