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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.

Circuit CAD Software for PCB Design Altium Designer is the complete circuit CAD software for PCB design. Altium Designer unifies capabilities from CAD software to help you complete challenging designs. Read Article
Altium Designer’s Board Layout Software Handling the ever-growing complexities of today’s routing demands requires board layout software that can keep up. When yesterday’s tools are no longer getting the job done, get back on the road of productive design today with the most powerful PCB design layout software. When you need powerful board layout software, you need to easily complete the following tasks: Visually and easily manage your PCB copper pours Peace of mind PCB layout with Read Article
Why Altium Designer Will Give You Better Results Over OrCAD A free download of software and a fancy demo can make PCB design tools seem very attractive. You owe it to yourself to do your research before you purchase so that you get the design features you need for success. Altium Designer delivers on its promise of an easy-to-learn, professional set of PCB design tools. When you switch to Altium Designer, you’ll have the same set of design features you’ll find in OrCAD and much more. You can also Read Article
Design Your PCB Stackup with Altium Designer Your PCB stackup is the foundation for your circuit board and will influence signal behavior. Your signals use internal plane layers as a potential reference, and your signal routing can be made easier with the right layer stack. In addition to determining the right arrangement of board layers, different board materials are placed in your PCB layer stack to satisfy calculations for power, impedance, and signal integrity. Modern designs will use Read Article
The Altium Autorouter: The Best Automated PCB Routing Tool Routing traces on your printed circuit board is that critical step during layout that creates the connectivity and functionality your board needs. It can also be time consuming if your design software doesn’t contain the right routing tools. Your PCB design software should include high-precision routing tools that are designed to automate many portions of the routing process. Advanced PCBs require the best PCB autorouter, and your automated Read Article
The PCB Design Process Methodology and Application Your next great idea probably started on a piece of notebook paper. How do you go about taking your great idea and turning it into a real design, and eventually into a finished product? There are a number of ways to approach your new design. Any new circuit board can be very complicated, but the right PCB design process methodology helps you get through the design process quickly. PCB designers follow a general PCB design process methodology, and Read Article
Routing Differential Microstrip Traces with Controlled Impedance Modern digital systems and low-level analog boards need methods for achieving precise characteristic impedance calculations and impedance control. Differential microstrip and stripline pairs have common-mode noise immunity if they are routed symmetrically, but they also need to have controlled differential impedance to ensure impedance matching and consistent propagation delay throughout an interconnect. With the differential microstrip impedance Read Article
Altium Designer: The Best Electronic Circuit Design Software You’ve probably already felt the pressure to get your projects done sooner and for less money. To meet these expectations, you can’t rely on anything less than the best electronic circuit design software you can find. What you don’t need is software that isn’t helpful, underperforms, and requires additional third-party tools to finish a design. What you need is software that contains the advanced circuit board design and PCB layout tools in the Read Article
Easily Create Your PCB Solder Mask in Altium Designer You’ve just finished the electrical layout of your board and now you are working through the final steps to prepare for PCB manufacturing and assembly. What steps do you need to take to get your board ready for production? Aside from generating deliverables like Gerber files, a bill of materials, drill files, silkscreen, and PCB assembly instructions, you’ll need to define the solder mask on the surface layers of your PCB. This important Read Article
Use PCB Routing Tools With an Integrated Trace Length Calculator If you’re a mechanical or electrical designer, you need CAD tools that provide accurate trace length and geometry calculations. Once you start working with high-speed or high-frequency circuits, propagation delay and skew become critical points to consider as you need to make sure your signals are properly timed throughout your nets. Altium Designer is the only PCB design package that includes an ultra-accurate trace length calculator for PCB Read Article
Schematic Drawing Software and PCB Layout Tools in Altium Designer Every circuit board starts with circuit diagrams and schematic sheets. Your schematic capture software takes your component and footprint data and creates an initial layout, which you then route to create a complete circuit board. If you’re just getting started with PCB design, you need a schematic diagram maker that helps you quickly move component data into a new layout. You shouldn’t need to use multiple programs to move from schematic drawing Read Article
Comparison of PCB Materials for High Speed and HDI Boards Any PCB uses a variety of materials to create a layer stackup, etch copper, apply solder mask, and print silkscreen. Each dielectric material you use to create your multilayer PCB stackup has different material properties, such as dielectric constant and thermal conductivity. When you’re designing for specialized applications, a thorough comparison of PCB materials can help you select the right base material for use in your next circuit board Read Article
Best Software for PCB Design and Manufacturability (DFM) Guidelines Getting your circuit board to manufacturing requires following certain manufacturability guidelines. Once you gain an understanding of DFM standards, you will be in a much better position to design your circuit boards to meet DFM expectations. As a PCB designer laying out a circuit board, you’ll find yourself having to manage these guidelines and standards to get your board through the manufacturing and assembly process. Altium Designer makes Read Article
Altium Rigid-flex Guidebook: Your Complete Design Guide Many electronic devices don’t live on a single printed circuit board. Flex and rigid-flex PCBs are used to link multiple rigid PCBs together into a single unit. This allows printed circuit designers to customize their board to odd enclosures, design motion into new devices and provides unique form factors that are not possible with rigid boards. Many other common devices are shrinking, and the PCBs that power them are following suit. If you’re Read Article
The Best Schematic Design Program for PCBs PCB design begins with a schematic, where you turn your design ideas into working circuits. When you use the right schematic design program to create your circuit boards, you can design and simulate your board in a single program. Once you use integrated schematic capture, you can start your circuit board layout and create real circuit boards. Only Altium Designer gives you all these features and many more in a single program. ALTIUM DESIGNER A Read Article
How to Build a Circuit Board With Altium’s PCB Design Software Your printed circuit board (PCB) design might be designed to be electrically correct, but you also need to be assured it can be manufactured. Even though you need a PCB manufacturer to fabricate and assemble your board, you need to implement design for manufacturing (DFM) to ensure your board can be manufactured at scale. Making sure your design is manufacturable is all about encoding DFM specifications in your design rules. With the rules-driven Read Article
Look No Further than Altium Designer for the Best PCB Design Software When it’s time to buy new PCB design software, you only want to buy the best of the best, and you’ll probably look through a PCB design software list to find the tools you need. Open source software carries zero price tag, but it simply isn’t capable of tasks professionals need to perform every day. If you’re considering a new PCB design software package, consider this first. You need all the tools the industry demands, and there is no reason to Read Article