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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.

Robert Feranec on How to Implement The PCB Design Process In this episode, we talk with Robert Feranec, a familiar name to many of our listeners. Apart from being a popular YouTuber, he’s also the founder and CEO of FEDEVEL Academy where he teaches PCB Design to people around the world. Robert shares what it takes to be a popular YouTuber, the work it takes to produce all the great content he creates and as a special bonus we’ll discuss Robert’s Keynote that he will deliver at AltiumLive PCB Summit this Read Article
Silicon Photonics Integration Challenges in PCB Design Silicon photonics will use the same manufacturing processes used in silicon ICs I was honored to meet Richard Soref at a recent IEEE conference and discuss the current state of electronic-photonic integrated circuits (EPICs). The man is often called “the Father of Silicon Photonics”, and for good reason. If you ask him nicely, he’ll tell you how to build all the fundamental logic gates as photonic circuits directly on silicon. Now is a landmark Read Article
Flex Circuit Specific Terms and Definitions Recently, I was having a few discussions with someone very new to flex design. I was trying to be helpful and going through several things that are specific to flex and rigid flex design which should be considered as you start your first design. He was listening and taking notes, and suddenly stopped me and said, “you lost me a few items back, I am not completely sure I understand this terminology.” This flashed me back to memories of my early Read Article
Stacking The Odds In Your Favor: Mastering The Art of Stackup Design As everyone knows, the PCB stackup is the substrate upon which all design elements are assembled. And, it is incumbent upon the product development engineer to own the PCB stackup process which includes calling out the exact type of laminate, prepreg and copper needed in every layer of the stackup as well as taking into account all of the electrical characteristics of the PCB to ensure a design that is fully functional from both a mechanical and Read Article
It’s Your Loss: Determining And Controlling Loss In The PCB Design Process When it comes to designing a high-speed PCB, we always have to factor in the dynamic of signal loss. And, there are lots of areas where loss can occur. Accounting for all of these aspects of loss can be a challenging and time-consuming task as too much loss can prevent a high-speed PCB from functioning properly. This article will address the various aspects of loss, how they factor into the PCB design process, and how loss can be effectively Read Article
New Multilayer Architecture: Power Mesh It’s funny how we accept the status quo as the only reality because it’s the only existence we’ve been subject to. In printed circuit design, the multilayer architecture is one such status quo. But it is not the only architecture that will work for high-speed designs. At Hewlett-Packard, we experimented with and implemented a higher performance architecture based on RF Design characteristics. It was not by accident, as our PCB design organization Read Article
Understand the AC and DC Return Path on a High-Performance Mixed-Signal PCB High performance mixed-signal PCBs are difficult to design. Proper grounding and routing are essential to ensure accurate ADC conversion. In this article we’ll discuss a complex topic; the importance of designing a controlled current path on high performance mixed (Analog/Digital) PCBs, and how this impacts the performance of your board. What are we going to learn? • Loop currents follow different path (depends from their frequency range.) • How Read Article
SMTA for Young Professionals The SMTA is an international non-profit with chapters across the world in the US, Canada, Mexico, India, Europe, Brazil, Hong Kong and Malaysia. Since it’s invention in the 1960’s; Surface Mount Technology has helped reduce waste, reduce consumer costs, and most importantly, reduce environmental impact. This industry is creative and inventive. Everything we touch has been engineered. Our industry leaders shape the world around us. Our goal as an Read Article
It’s All Analog “It’s all analog!” I would state emphatically, often banging the table for effect. Those in the room that knew me would continue working, those that didn’t believe me could be seen to roll their eyes, but sometimes I would get the attention of a new hire or someone just out of school, and they might ask “what about digital?” The time was the middle of the 1980s, and I was working at Commodore Business Systems as a senior design engineer, which Read Article
Insertion Loss Deviation or Intersymbol Interference Noise? In a previous blog, I discussed how channel quality is quantified by eye patterns [1]. There, it is explained how eye patterns are created from the thru S-parameters only. So, if you are using the thru S-parameters alone, do reflections even matter? Intuitively, it would seem like they don’t matter since they are not directly used to calculate the eye pattern. But, of course reflections matter! Reflections cause signal integrity problems, and I’d Read Article
Custom Footprint Creation in Altium Designer Download PDF
29:51 Efficient Polygon Practices Creating, deleting, and modifying the polygon pours on your board is something you do every day, but are you doing Watch Video
Agile Development for Embedded Systems: The Best of Both Worlds You might want to use agile development to build this embedded system As unique hardware platforms that provide computing power in a variety of applications, embedded systems combine the best of every techie’s dreams: hardware design and software development. Design processes for simpler embedded systems tend to be linear, and the hardware and embedded software may even be developed in parallel by different design teams. As systems become more Read Article
Integrate Your ECAD Tools with Mechanical Design Software Communication between ECAD and MCAD teams can be like a game of telephone Ever play a game of telephone as a child? Once the message gets back to the sender, successive miscommunication along the way causes the original message and idea to be completely modified. This is the same thing that happens when mechanical and electrical design teams are siloed into different groups. Collaboration breaks down and communication becomes difficult. The Read Article
ECAD/MCAD Co-design for PCB Manufacturing with 3D Printing It is ironic that PCB design has helped drive the adoption of new technology in all industries, including manufacturing automation, yet PCB manufacturing processes themselves have not seen radical innovation for many decades. Some innovative companies are looking to change this and are driving PCB manufacturing into Industry 4.0. 3D printing is already driving new manufacturing methodologies in every industry, such as “lights out” and digital Read Article
Growth and the PCB Design Learning Zone The phone rang at my desk. Tracy was on the other end. It had been several weeks since she had surgery for her implant. I could tell from the tone of her voice that she had exciting news. “Do you think you might be able to get an afternoon off?”, she asked. “Sure, how come what’s up?” I responded. “Well, it’s been 5 weeks since my surgery, and everything is completely healed up. I wanted to ask.” She hesitated for a moment, “Wanted to know if you Read Article
High-Quality, Reviewable PCB Component Libraries Over many years, I have seen many elaborate PCB Library systems. The best ones were not based on the size, but rather the quality of the information. The old axiom is “not Quantity but rather Quality.” I recently sat with a VP of Engineering, and I asked what he thought of his PCB Library. He thought for a moment and said, “I believe it is pretty good.” I asked my question another way, “But do you know?” There is a difference. If I tell you that Read Article