PCB Design Resources and Information | Altium

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.

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Modeling Copper Foil Roughness in Altium Designer's Impedance Profiler

Modeling Copper Foil Roughness in Altium Designer's Impedance Profiler Advanced transmission line models for long interconnects require that designers include copper foil roughness calculations in order to determine accurate impedance. Without the right models or design software, you’ll be left to estimate the skin effect impedance, dispersion, and parasitics in your PCB. These models can be difficult to work with by hand if you’re not mathematically inclined, but the right design tools can be used to quickly Read Article

25 micron trace and space in high density PCB design

High Density PCB Design Game Changer: 25 Micron Trace and Space ‌ Have you heard the latest development in PCB fabrication processes? High density PCB design follows the same trend seen in integrated circuits, where more functionality is packed into a smaller space. The smaller spacing in these boards makes precise manufacturing more difficult, which places important DFM rules on your high density PCB design. Now with the A-SAP™ process, you can place trace widths and spacing down to 1 mil, allowing tight Read Article

Getting Through PCB DFM

Getting Through a PCB DFM Check If you’re reading an Altium Blog, it’s probably safe to say that you’ve either designed or fabricated printed circuit boards. If you’re like me, sending a design to fab is a bittersweet experience. On the one hand, you’ll soon have your hands on the hardware you’ve been working hard to design. But on the other hand, you know the fabrication site is going to send a list of PCB DFM requests, and that’s never fun. In this article, we’ll discuss the Read Article

IPC, Molding the Future of Printed Design Engineering

Exploring IPC’s Network of Printed Board Design Engineers Watch and learn how IPC can help you elevate your PCB design skills and career. Read Article

Circuit Board Design for In-Circuit Testing with Jack Olson

Circuit Board Design for In-Circuit Testing There are many types of circuit board tests available in electronics manufacturing today, each having unique goals and characteristics. This article presents guidelines at the design level (schematic and layout) to enable the use of in-circuit testing (ICT) fixtures to verify proper component assembly. These simple test fixtures allow your board to be tested as its assembled, which helps identify and remove failed boards from your production run Read Article

Image of San Diego PCB holding PCB board with the text "I made this"

Showcase Your Designs and Win We’re giving away free licenses, official Altium-branded merch and more to engineers, students, makers, and hobbyists just like you. Create and submit a short video that can showcase your past, current, or even an all-new creation designed using Altium for a chance to win prizes and be featured on the Altium Stories YouTube channel. Prizes Top 5 Videos Free Altium Designer License on Altium 365 with Concord Pro Official Altium T-shirt Shoutout on Read Article

PCB Additive Manufacturing and supply chain volatility

PCB Additive Manufacturing: The Vaccine for Electronics Supply Shocks? At this time, at least a quarter of the world’s population is under quarantine, with workers unable to go to offices or factories, leading to fundamental disabling of the world economy. The electronics industry is suffering greatly as well, dealing with a supply shock from factories shutting down in Southeast Asia, to demand-side shocks from Western markets literally shutting down. Worst of all, the COVID-19 pandemic has created an enormous Read Article

The Role Of ISU Petasys, A Multilayer Manufacturing Company in Realizing a Successful PCB Implementation

The Role Of ISU Petasys, A Multilayer Manufacturing Company in Realizing a Successful PCB Implementation John Stephens, Senior Vice President of Sales for ISU Petasys (pronounced “E-soo”), built his first circuit board in 1974. Like many others of us in the industry, he got a first-hand education in PCB design, and manufacturing and assembly by working in the aerospace industry. He explains, “I started in aerospace at Litton Guidance and Control Systems, where I worked in a process development lab that was basically a prototyping shop where we Read Article

LTE + GNSS Asset Tracker Part 2

LTE + GNSS Asset Tracker Part 2 This is Part Two of my LTE GNSS Asset Tracker project. In part one, I identified the right components for the project and captured the schematics. In this part, we are going to finish the project up with the PCB layout and routing. In the last article, I had stated my goal of making this board as small as possible with the intention of making a high density board, expecting I’d need 6 layers for the routing. However, a board’s total size is Read Article

PCB assembly (PCBA) and supply chain management

Take the Risk Out of Prototype PCB Assembly (PCBA) Take the risk out of your PCB assembly (PCBA) with supply chain management. There is a special feeling one gets when polishing off a Rev A design and ordering the first set of PCBs from a board house. While designers everywhere would likely not trade that feeling for anything, taking some of the uneasiness off the table would probably be a welcome change. Here are review steps that should prove more effective at settling nerves than an after-work Read Article

Figure of Merit: A Way to Score Your Opinions

Figure of Merit: A Way to Score Your Opinions Metrics are data, and statistically backed measures. It is always expedient to base decisions on data and metrics. But what if a metric doesn’t exist? Then you can create the next best measure: the Figure of Merit. The problem with opinions is that they are difficult to defend, and when used in conjunction with producibility, they often they vary from person to person. That is why the Figure of Merit process is so popular. For a small amount of Read Article

Hardward-in-the-Loop Testing: An Introduction

Hardware-in-the-Loop Testing: An Introduction If you do a search for “Hardware-in-the-Loop” testing, you will frequently find examples of complex, real-time systems. This article from National Instruments, for example, gives a nice explanation and background on what hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) is, and provides an example of testing electronic control units within an automobile. In this article, we will be focusing on a smaller, more bite-sized version of HIL testing concepts. What is Hardware Read Article

Towards a Deeper Understanding with the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute

Towards a Deeper Understanding with the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute Discover how Altium Designer + Altium 365 are helping power groundbreaking research on climate change and fostering a deeper understanding of our ecosystem with the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. Read Article

COVID-19 Challenge

COVID-19 Challenge My name is Piotr Lazarek. I’m a 19 year old engineer studying at Dulwich College in London. Because of the pandemic, I was forced to fly back to Poland for quarantine. To be frank, it wasn’t an easy time for me—after a week, I was practically dying of boredom. Thankfully, around that time, I received an invitation for a project called “COVID-19 Challenge”. The project was aimed at sixth form and university students who were passionate about Read Article

Setting Up Concord Pro Revisions and Lifecycle

Setting Up Concord Pro Revisions and Lifecycle Precursor To help PCB Designers to become better at what they do, there are various Blog series on Concord Pro which are presented in such a way that they are first broken into by categories. These categories walk through the entire process of efficiently using Concord Pro. At the end of each blog are practical steps you can take to get organized, and get the most out of Concord Pro for your PCB projects. Introduction We are continuing to set up Read Article

Best Practices Cultivating a Healthy and Productive Remote Working Environment

Best Practices Cultivating a Healthy and Productive Remote Working Environment Don’t babysit your remote team. Watch and learn how to promote a productive remote working environment. Read Article

Make the Free Switch and Import from KiCad to Altium Designer

Make the Free Switch and Import from KiCad to Altium Designer Free PCB design software can be a great thing, especially when you’re just getting started as a new designer or a hobbyist. As you gain more experience and you start working with more complex products or in a professional setting you’ll start to find that each KiCad and Altium Designer software tools have nuances, but there is only one that focuses on productivity for professional hardware engineers. If you have serious time constraints you want Read Article