PCB Design Resources and Information | Altium

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

The Moon by 2024, Mars by 2040, and Then? It seems the chances are improving that we will one day become a true space-faring species. Read Article

Design Reliable Multiple Stack Microvias Like a Pro In this podcast episode , learn how Gerry Partida and his team at Summit Interconnect made a compelling new discovery about the reliability of multiple stacked microvias. Watch it now. Read Article

Online Educational Resources for Mastering PCB Design Ben Jordan, “Dean of Altium Academy”, shares details about the central hub for educational resources: documentation, videos, and tips for mastering your Altium software. Read Article

OnTrack Newsletter: COVID-19, Virtual Education, and Blogs - April 2020 OnTrack Newsletter April 2020 VOL. 3 No 11 What Impact will the Coronavirus have on Your Designs? Around the world, we’ve all felt the sting of COVID-19 on safety, health, travel, global markets and our workplace. Wondering what impact this may have on design engineers, we reached out to Mike Buetow, the Editor-In-Chief for PCD&F (Printed Circuit Design and Fabrication) and Circuits Assembly magazines to learn about his viewpoint on what Read Article

OnTrack Newsletter: Rogers Corp Growth, RF Design and Brain Food - March 2020 OnTrack Newsletter March 2020 VOL. 3 No 10 Rogers Corporation: The Company Behind Top Performing Laminates If you design PCBs for high-speed digital, RF, Microwave or Millimeter Wave applications, you’re probably very familiar with Rogers laminates. However, did you know Rogers Corp has doubled in size in the past 10 years? Recently, while I was at IPC APEX Expo, I had the opportunity to interview Tony Mattingly, Sr. Product Manager and learn Read Article

OnTrack Newsletter: Engineering Stories, RF Design and Brain Food OnTrack Newsletter February 2020 VOL. 3 No 9 New Engineering Mini-Documentary Series: Altium Stories Too often, in the pursuit of healthy success and growth, it’s tempting for companies to talk about its products or services too much, and their customer’s success too little. While Altium may certainly fall into this all-too-common trap at times, we truly draw our greatest inspiration from innovative engineers like you, who are impacting the world Read Article

The EMC Doctor is in: Ken Wyatt on EMI and PCB Health The OnTrack Podcast welcomes Ken Wyatt (also known as ‘the EMC Doctor’). Ken is an EMC Engineer, a prolific author on EMI/EMC related topics, and an industry consultant. Read Article

Industry 4.0, Artificial Intelligence, and IoT in Manufacturing When it comes to electronics, consumer devices like smartphones and Alexa tend to get all the attention. However, according to Alun Morgan at Ventec International Group, “about 23% of PCBs produced worldwide are used in electronics equipment for manufacturing applications.” The numbers only go up when you include other non-consumer categories that support manufacturing operations, such as automotive, telecom, power generation/distribution, and Read Article

Lane Recognition and Tracking with NVIDIA Jetson Nano Autonomous vehicles are slowly becoming an important part of the automotive industry. Many believe fully autonomous vehicles will soon be driving alongside humans, and technology companies are in a race to deploy fully autonomous vehicles. In December 2018, Waymo, the company that emerged from Google’s self-driving car project, officially started its commercial self-driving car service in the suburbs of Phoenix. Companies like May Mobility, Drive Read Article

Production-Grade Battery Modules for Raspberry Pi Zero I’ll admit, I’m a big fan of Raspberry Pi. This set of inexpensive boards packs plenty of general purpose computing power into a small form factor, it easily connects to a LAN/WiFi and is accessible via SSH, and its memory is easily expandable with a micro SD card. It’s also easy to get a new prototype embedded application up and running directly from your laptop. The one aspect that prevents its application as a production-grade embedded system Read Article

PCB Design Review and Collaboration in Altium Concord Pro Remote collaboration tools are everywhere these days, and now designers have access to a convenient collaboration system for electronics design. Whether you’re part of a design team, or you need to quickly execute any design changes recommended by your manufacturer, you need cloud collaboration tools that are immediately accessible within your PCB design application. Now with Altium Concord Pro, you’ll have access to a cloud-driven design Read Article

Differential Pair Length Matching: Best Practices for Signal Integrity Take two signals and send them down a parallel bus or differential pair. How can you be sure the downstream receiver will latch to your signals? If your signals don’t arrive at the same place and at the same time, then gates in your receiver won’t latch at just the right moment. This delicate balance can be like walking a tightrope across a cliff, and it can be difficult to maintain differential pair length matching by eyeing your trace lengths Read Article

How Do Pads and Vias Impact Total Capacitor Parasitic Inductance? In this blog article we discuss how the footprint and mounting style affect capacitor parasitic inductance. The pads and vias back to the PCB power planes increase the total series inductance of the capacitor. Read Article

An Overview Of PCB Outer Layer Processing Expert Kella Knack describes in detail the fabrication of the PCB outer layer. Read and learn about how different vias are formed and the steps involved in the multilayer build-up process. Read Article

The PCB Fabrication Process—What Every Design Engineer Needs To Know, Part 1 In the olden and not-so-olden days of PCB development, the process of moving a board from design to manufacturing was often referred to as “throwing the design over the wall.” This was not the result of the operations being so clearly divided, but rather a way to assign ownership and blame if there were errors. My last project at Martin Marietta was a black hole program for the U.S. Airforce and Navy. When problems were encountered during the Read Article

Working with Design Variants Introduction They say variety is the spice of life. That is also the case for PCB designs. It may come as a shock to some, but many companies are in business and always chasing this thing called “profits” (I am using my sarcastic voice). It is entirely understandable that profit is what keeps the doors open and people employed. A significant way that they improve the bottom line is to have a variety of product lines available to their customers Read Article

Arduino Portenta H7 Brings Dev Boards to Production Grade When I hear the name “Arduino,” I don’t usually think of production-grade hardware. I’m not talking down to the folks at Arduino, they’ve done an excellent job at invading the educational and proof-of-concept development niches, to the extent that other hardware platforms simply haven’t been able to catch up. Arduino boards are an excellent choice for low volume functional prototyping and embedded software development. But what about production Read Article