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Altium Concord Pro™ as a standalone product and brand name has been discontinued and the capabilities are now available as part of our Altium enterprise solutions. Learn more here. Introduction First off, before I say anything, the more that I have been using Altium Concord Pro™, the more I like it. In fact, I love it. Altium has surprised me many times with the quality of the tools they put out. A few examples: Draftsman®, ACTIVEBOM® or...

The ability to do a 3D mock-up within your design software, is an invaluable tool that no doubt has prevented countless re-designs and revision changes. This is particularly powerful in the world of flex and rigid flex. When the circuit is intended to be bent, folded, or formed it is very easy to make a mistake with pinouts and orientation. Before the power to model this within the design tool, paper-dolls and mylar cut outs were often used...

EDA has come a long way since the 1960’s. Image source: Autodesk Before the birth of EDA, circuit boards and integrated circuits were all designed by hand or some other manual process. The need for more advancement in electronics design made clear the need for automation, a transition which took roughly 10 years and began with drafting in the mid-1970s. The publication of “Introduction to VLSI Systems” by Carver Mead and Lynn Conway in 1980...

One of the fundamental aspects of any circuit diagram is the return current path or electrical return path. In a circuit diagram and a schematic diagram, the path the current follows to return to the low potential side of a power source should be obvious, but it may not be so obvious in a PCB. To quote the great Eric Bogatin at his PCB West 2019 presentation, the distinction between a schematic diagram and a PCB layout lives in the white space of...

As more designs are using smaller components with surface-mount pads, Surface-mount Technology (SMT) soldering defects can mount and impact yields due to various design and manufacturing problems. These problems may have been minor and had a negligible effect on yields in the past, but they can cause rework costs to mount quickly and should be avoided. Here is a basic SMT defect list you can avoid during design and assembly. Bridging Between...

In Part 1 of my article I outlined the various test structures that can and should be incorporated into any given PCB design. Included in this was a description of how they are built, where they are located and how they are used to ensure PCB structural and performance integrity. As speeds have increased and designs have become much more complex, test structures have become a necessity rather than features that can be added indiscriminately...

An important part of any high-speed design is making sure it can be tested successfully during manufacture and operation. Since these tests are performed significantly downstream from the PCB design process, they are not often properly and thoroughly accounted for as part of this process. This article will address two important aspects of the design for test process: creating test structures (aka test point connections) within the board, and de...

In a perfect world, a box and enclosure are designed, and then printed circuit boards or flexible circuits are designed to fit within that box perfectly, meeting all the electrical and mechanical requirements of the project. Sadly, most of us don’t get to work in that perfect world and at times must deal with challenges to that original plan. Things don’t always work as expected. Sometimes that is because something obvious was missed., Often it...