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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...

My open-source Altium component library contains hundreds of schematic symbols, supplying over 100,000 components for use. People are often surprised when I tell them it only takes a few minutes to make a schematic symbol using Altium, even if the part has a high pin count. In this article, I want to show you how you can leverage some of the tools in Altium to create your own symbols quickly. Pre-requisites Before we get started, you’ll need a...

Power planes (sometimes called a power layer) and ground planes are important for more than just distribution of supplying power. When defining reference planes, both with impedance controlled routing and in managing return paths, your stackup might force return currents to pass into a PCB power plane before being coupled back to a ground layer. Even though you define a GND reference layer as a the basis for your impedance-controlled trace width...

In some of our previous articles, we have talked about the various things that go wrong when a board design is turned over to the fabricator for manufacturing. Sometimes, the things that can go awry are due to design errors but the bulk of them can be ascribed to errors incurred during the fabrication process. This article will describe the errors that can be encountered and what, if anything, can be done to avoid them. We have previously...

When I was first learning the finer points of PCB design, my first impression that the core was some type of special material that did not have close resemblance to the other layers. This is not necessarily the case, but designers need to work within the core/prepreg stackup constraints imposed by the PCB manufacturing process. Although you may be constrained as to how the layers in your board are arranged, you can choose which core/prepreg...

In Part 1 of this article, I reviewed the four basic types of PCB transmission lines and the various equations used for calculating the impedance associated with those lines. Part 1 also discussed why those equations only tell part of the story, and why there are other influencers including 2D field solvers; knowing the glass-to-resin ratio and knowing the frequency at which transmission lines will be used that impact the process of ensuring that...

In a previous article, I talked about the various transmission line properties that affect impedance. In this two-part article, I will address the methods used for calculating impedance. Included at the end of Part 1 is a list of 2D field solvers along with brief descriptions of their capabilities. Part 2 of this article will address other design aspects that influence impedance, including the frequency at which impedance should be measured...

Here and in several other articles published on the Altium Resource section of the company’s website, the topic of transmission line impedance has been addressed from a number of different perspectives. I have addressed transmission line impedance previously in my article, The Evolution Of Simulation Technology and Impedance and, it might seem that we may have exhausted the field of potential information that can be provided on impedance...

In recent articles, I have addressed reflections, what they do to signals on transmission lines and how to control them through the use of terminations, serial and parallel. One area of confusion that continues to come up in our on-site classes regards the actual placement of terminators. This article will address this topic and hopefully provide some useful guidelines. Note: I am only addressing series and parallel terminations. Most of the...