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.

Through Thick And Thin — How Do You Get High Current Into a High Speed PCB? The typical large currents in today’s high speed PCB designs require a different approach. This article will describe the stackup requirements associated with these very large current PCBs and how to design them so that they can be readily manufactured properly. Read Article

How Vias Can Affect Very High-speed Signals In a variety of articles posted on Altium’s resource center as well as in several other technical articles, papers, and conference proceedings, the advantages of differential signaling and its ability to deliver very high data rates have been touted. But, as with many things in life, those things that are beneficial can also have a downside. Such is the case with today’s products that deliver 32 Gbps and above data rates and the vias that are Read Article

A Short Tour Through The PCB Design Process In several previous articles, I have addressed the PCB design process in terms of the tools involved, the basics of electromagnetic behavior on transmission lines, signal integrity, power delivery design and numerous other PCB design-related topics. But, one of the most important basics is to have a good sense of the factors that are considered to have the fastest design flow. This info spans the buses and types of signals including operating Read Article

Bandwidth Requirements For Differential Signals This article provides an overview of the benefits of differential signaling and how it operates in a working electronic product. Read Article

The Switching Behavior Of A Series-Terminated Transmission Line Series-terminated lines and differential signals serve as the links in all CMOS devices. While I have written extensively on differential signaling, its operations and its benefits, I have not addressed the switching behavior of a series-terminated line. That is the purpose of this article. The Basics The salient points about a series-terminated transmission line include the following: In this type of transmission line, a series termination is Read Article

Developing a PCB Testing Procedure for New Designs As noted in several of my previous articles, at Speeding Edge, we are big proponents of putting test structures into PCBs. The impetus for incorporating these structures covers a wide variety of topics—it’s a new design; you’re using new component technology; a new laminate or a new fabricator to name a few. There are many critical performance characteristics required of today’s electronic products. They operate at high frequencies, move enormous Read Article

Real-time PCB Component Traceability in Altium Concord Pro PCB designers and project managers in highly regulated industries face a number of obstacles when managing the design process and preparing for manufacturing. Aside from paying attention to industry standards, performance requirements, and coordinating electrical and mechanical design teams, component sourcing carries its own requirements. Supply chain glitches can delay a prototyping or high volume manufacturing run by weeks or even months, and Read Article

Modeling PCB Interconnects as Causal Systems Real PCB interconnects are causal systems and must be modeled with the correct time-dependent behavior. Read Article

IoT PCB Design: It's More Than Just Hardware Development IoT products are lovely and sometimes frustrating products. Design teams need to be multifunctional to design these products successfully. They need to get the hardware, embedded software, web platform and/or app, and mechanical enclosure perfect if they want to see market success. Problems in any of these areas mean your new product will be substandard and, eventually, competitive products will win market share. So what does it take to ensure Read Article

The History and Use of Cross-Hatched Planes Read to learn all about hatch ground in your PCB instead of using ground planes. You'll learn about how this type of ground region impacts signal integrity. Read Article

The Benefits of High-Dk PCB Materials The terms “high-speed design” and “low-Dk PCB laminate” are often used in the same articles, and often in the same sentence. Low-Dk PCB materials have their place in high speed and high-frequency PCBs, but high-Dk PCB materials provide power integrity. Low-Dk PCBs are typically chosen as they tend to have lower loss tangent. Thus high-DK PCB materials tend to get overlooked for high speed and high-frequency PCBs. When we look at power integrity Read Article

1:18:28 [Live Webinar - Altium Designer 20.1] 6 Reasons to Switch Design Tools Come see how Altium Designer, the industry standard for PCB design, combined with Altium 365 delivers the world’s first connected Watch Video

Which Type of Capacitor Should You Use? Capacitors are used in far more applications than just bypassing noise, and there are many more types of capacitors than just ceramic and aluminium electrolytic. Read Article

A Guide to Challenging Projects Starting a project? Here's an expert advise from Mark Harris to get you through challenging design projects. Read this blog and see if this method will work for you. Read Article

36:28 Length Matching in High Speed Buses With ever increasing speeds in high speed data systems comes a couple of PCB layout challenges. High speed busses like Watch Video

The Increasingly Important Role Of Dielectric Loss Tangent In PCB Laminates Learn more about dielectric loss tangent, the role it plays in high-speed designs, and how it varies as a result of the glass to resin ratio and frequency. Read Article

Solder Bridge Jumper Best Practices in PCB Design A PCB variant is often simply thought of as a new layout created from an old design. However, if you’re creative with your routing and layout, you can use a solder bridge jumper to configure portions of a single PCB layout for multiple variants. This lets you quickly create variants of a PCB layout without rerouting traces or changing your schematics. If you plan to use jumpers in your PCB layout, there are some important guidelines to follow to Read Article