PCB Design Resources and Information

Explore Altium's Resource hub to discover content from blog posts and design guides to technical white papers, all gathered together for your convenience and written by Altium's community of PCB design experts.

Documentation • Training • Webinars • Livestreams • Education / Student Programs • Support • Altium Academy

Your Complete Guide to Via Stub Analysis Via stub accumulate loss for high speed and high frequency signals. Here’s how you can spot problems with stubs and solve them easily. Read Article

The What, Why and How of Data Management More than 15 million components to choose from to design your board, where do you begin? Watch and learn from the Library Management expert himself John Watson. Read Article

Advanced Tools for Your Aluminum PCB Layout

The Best Printed Circuit Board Design Software for Your Aluminum PCB Whether for thermal performance, electrical isolation, or mechanical strength, your aluminum PCB needs the precision of Altium Designer to meet your design requirements. Altium Designer allows almost any aspect of your circuit boards to be customized, including the metal core or backing on an aluminum PCB. Designers can also specify other materials in their documentation for their fabricator, such as ceramics, aluminum flex PCBs, or other Read Article

Create, Share, Collaborate, and View CAD Drawings with Altium Designer PCB design collaboration is easy with a complete set of design tools and a cloud platform to view CAD drawings. Your PCB design features should make it easy to create a circuit board and take it through manufacturing. Instead of settling for freeware CAD programs or mechanical programs like AutoCAD, your team can connect through powerful tools that allow secure access to all design files in a PCB project. Whether you need to view your board or Read Article

Manufacturing Output Files and Why They are Important

With Altium Designers PCBDOC Viewer Nothing is Left to Chance With Altium’s free PCBDOC viewer, every member of your design team will have read-only access to your design data leaving nothing to chance. ALTIUM DESIGNER Any kind of file viewing should be an easy process for your PCB design software. Your printed circuit board design may have started with just yourself or a small team of people, but by the time it is completed there will be a lot more involved. There will be people checking to make sure that Read Article

The Mysterious 50 Ohm Impedance: Where It Came From and Why We Use It 50 Ohm impedance became the standard impedance used in RF transmission lines long ago, but it is still useful today and is a standard reference impedance used in test equipment. Read Article

36:34 SPICE Simulation Made Simple SPICE simulation saves you critical time in the prototyping phase. Understanding your simulation interface makes it simple to analyze how Watch Video

The SOSA Standard: What PCB Designers Need to Know Learn more about the new SOSA standard for embedded systems. PCB designers working on aerospace and military embedded systems will need to design to this standard. Read Article

Jira for Hardware Development: Tools and Processes New collaboration tools can create a Jira for hardware development-type process for PCB designers and electrical engineers. Read Article

Common Printed Circuit Board Defects You Can Fix in the Cloud Solve these printed circuit board defects you can fix with the cloud collaboration tools in Altium Designer. Read Article

FR4 Dielectric Constant and Material Properties High-speed and high-frequency boards need accurate dispersion calculations to ensure signal integrity and accurate propagation delay. FR4 is the most popular type of PCB laminate, and its material properties are well-documented. We’ve compiled the important material properties for FR4, including FR4 dielectric constant, thermal conductivity, and more. Altium Designer includes an accurate wideband Debye model calculation for FR4 dielectric Read Article

How the Best Integrated PCB Libraries Lower Development Costs With development schedules becoming tighter and technology advancing at an ever faster pace, designers and engineers need tools that help them cut development costs and stay competitive in every way. This means designers need supply chain tools that help them compare electronic component prices and manage their fabrication data in a single program. Each integrated library helps lower development costs and time by providing the supply chain Read Article

Automate Front End Engineering Processes with Kent Balius This episode is all about smart engineering. Learn how an automated process can help increase your profits and revenues. Read Article

How to Navigate the Perils of PCB Design Review Whether you’re a first-time designer or a hardened veteran, the integrity of your designs relies heavily on inspecting a product for design errors before production. What can be done to identify design flaws while staying productive? Before a new design is sent into production, it's critical to put the design through a PCB design review so that design errors can be identified before manufacturing. In many cases, a design will pass rules checks Read Article

Sync Your Electronics Inventory Management System With the Cloud Do you use internal databases and tracking tools for electronics inventory management? Sync your inventory management system with the cloud. Read Article

Detroit Become Human Cosplay with Flexible PCBs and CircuitPython A Father’s Story for “Introduce A Girl To STEM Day” Read Article

Working with Customer PCB Fabrication Data Through the Cloud Manufacturing won’t begin until you can receive and inspect PCB fabrication data from customers. Here’s how Altium 365 helps by bringing design and fab data into Altium Designer. Read Article