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.

Real-World Monitoring with Encoders Electrical devices don't tend to be useful unless they can interact with the real world, taking measures, producing outputs, or responding to events, for example. One functional ability that devices may require is the capability to measure physical movement. This may be a wheeled vehicle traveling across a surface or a fixed machine's shaft rotation. An encoder is a sensor that turns a position into an electrical signal. This position may be Read Article

Best Practices for Using Reference Designs Reference designs can help you get started building a new system, but watch out for these pitfalls if you plan to use reference designs for your PCB. Read Article

Best Practices for Sharing PCB Files vs. Sharing PCB Projects When is it best to share files vs. sharing projects for your PCB design? Altium 365 gives you both options in your web browser or within Altium Designer. Read Article

Anatomy of Latitude Part Two: "Thread with a Needle” in the context of energy We continue to explore the magic of energy conversion in a PWM transducer. Why is it magic? Theoretically, as we saw in the previous section, the line stabilizer initially converts some of the useful power into heat, which makes the efficiency of the line stabilizer less than 100%, and it is expected for technical systems. Theoretically, in a PWM transducer this happens without losses, isn't that magic? A PWM transducer, like a tailor with Read Article

Anatomy of Latitude Part One: Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) as a Result of the Evolution of Linear Systems Great Ideas and Smart Solutions There are different techniques in the world of technology to achieve various goals, both final and intermediate. Some techniques are so successful that they are commonly used with high efficiency. Electronics is no exception. Great ideas and ingenious solutions are found and applied in this area probably more than in other engineering fields. The greatest example is the use of Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) signals Read Article

Complete Guide to DIY SMT Assembly In Your Office I want to share a little secret with you in this article: Assembling SMT prototypes boards is not only easy, but it requires very little equipment. Using just a stencil, I can easily hand prototype down to 0.3 mm pitch ICs, and 0201 (imperial) sized passive components. Tiny wafer-scale components can definitely be a challenge, but the majority of prototypes that are regularly produced can be hand-assembled in a couple of hours with production Read Article

Transmission Line Fundamentals And Electromagnetic Fields, Part 1 Learn more about transmission line fundamentals and how they carry electromagnetic fields. Read Article

OnTrack Newsletter: Component Shortages, Industry Trends and Online Education - March 2021 OnTrack Newsletter March 2021 VOL. 4 No 6 State of the Electronics Industry 2021 Vincent Mazur, Technical Product Marketing Engineer, Altium Ltd. With the challenges of 2020 behind us, what challenges and opportunities lie ahead for hardware designers in 2021? In this article, Vince Mazur, Technical Product Marketing Engineer at Altium looks ahead to three emerging trends and share steps to address each one successfully in the year ahead. Read Read Article

Your Complete Guide to Via Stub Analysis Via stub accumulate loss for high speed and high frequency signals. Here’s how you can spot problems with stubs and solve them easily. Read Article

The What, Why and How of Data Management More than 15 million components to choose from to design your board, where do you begin? Watch and learn from the Library Management expert himself John Watson. Read Article

State of the Electronics Industry 2021 With the challenges of 2020 behind us, what challenges and opportunities lie ahead for hardware designers in 2021? In this article Vince Mazur, Technical Product Marketing Engineer at Altium, looks ahead to three emerging trends and share steps to address each one successfully in the year ahead. Introduction It's an understatement to say that 2020 is a year that we won't soon forget. Last year imposed many new challenges on all of us-- Read Article

The Mysterious 50 Ohm Impedance: Where It Came From and Why We Use It 50 Ohm impedance became the standard impedance used in RF transmission lines long ago, but it is still useful today and is a standard reference impedance used in test equipment. Read Article

36:34 SPICE Simulation Made Simple SPICE simulation saves you critical time in the prototyping phase. Understanding your simulation interface makes it simple to analyze how Watch Video

The SOSA Standard: What PCB Designers Need to Know Learn more about the new SOSA standard for embedded systems. PCB designers working on aerospace and military embedded systems will need to design to this standard. Read Article

Jira for Hardware Development: Tools and Processes New collaboration tools can create a Jira for hardware development-type process for PCB designers and electrical engineers. Read Article

Common Printed Circuit Board Defects You Can Fix in the Cloud Solve these printed circuit board defects you can fix with the cloud collaboration tools in Altium Designer. Read Article

Automate Front End Engineering Processes with Kent Balius This episode is all about smart engineering. Learn how an automated process can help increase your profits and revenues. Read Article