Mobile menu
Home

Explore content from blog posts to technical white papers gathered together for your convenience. All written by Altium's community of PCB design experts.

Part 2: Why Your PCB Design Review Process Is Obsolete and What You Can Do About It Part 2: Why Your PCB Design Review Process Is Obsolete and What You Can Do About It As we established in Part 1, the PCB design review and collaboration practices have room for improvement in many organizations. To address this, we developed Altium 365. Let's examine how running a PCB project through Altium 365 compares to other methods. One source of truth, visibility, and version control To start using Altium 365, you need to create a workspace and a centralized location for your design files, libraries, and collaboration Read Article
PCB routing How to Route a PCB Learn about Routing a PCB and how to design traces to proper routing in any device. You can access the best PCB routing features in Altium Designer. Read Article
Efficient Heat Dissipation with SMD Heat Sinks Keeps You From Dropping PCBs Efficient Heat Dissipation with SMD Heat Sinks Keeps You From Dropping PCBs In electronics, there is the possibility that your PCB can get pretty hot due to power dissipation in certain components. Whenever a component reaches an extreme temperature that goes beyond a component's safe operating range, its lifetime will be greatly reduced or the component may fail immediately. The heat-producing component being defective means the entire PCBA will need to be scrapped. There are many things to consider when dealing with Read Article
PCB simulation How to Simulate a PCB Design Get started with a PCB simulation and learn how to simulate a PCB design. Make sure you use the best PCB simulation software in Altium Designer's unified environment. Read Article
Gibbs ringing What Causes Gibbs Ringing in High-speed Channel Simulations? Gibbs ringing is both a measurement artifact and a calculation artifact that arises in band-limited channels. Make sure you understand how this arises due to transform and convolution operations. Read Article
PCB component creation What is PCB Component Creation? Learn more about PCB component creation and how you can easily create components with the best CAD features in Altium Designer. Read Article
State of PCB Design Education State of PCB Design Education Zach Peterson shares his insights about the availability and accessibility of education related to PCB design for high school and university students. Watch or listen on the go now. Read Article
buck converter regulator STM32 Buck Converter Regulator vs LDO for DC, AC, and RF: Which is Best? For small, low-current loads, LDO is usually the best option. What about a buck converter? Learn more about choosing between a buck converter vs. LDO in this guide. Read Article
Which Types of Opto-Isolators Are Right For Your Signal? Which Types of Opto-Isolators Are Right For Your Signal? An opto-isolator is an electronic device that can be used to pass information between a diode without passing an electrical current. Because there is no need ot directly pass voltage or current between the inputs and outputs in an opto-isolator, these components can be used to provide electrical isolation two regions in a PCB. Opto-isolators act as a protection mechanism, ensuring that harmful electrical currents cannot flow across the device. In Read Article
PCB silkscreen Your Guide to PCB Silkscreen PCB silkscreen helps ensure your board is easy to read and test, and it aids assembly by clearly indicating component locations. Read Article
Voltage Derating for Ceramic Capacitors Voltage Derating for Ceramic Capacitors Operating just about any type of capacitor below its maximum rated voltage ensures a longer operating life. Such components’ performance will degrade in response to the application of voltages approaching their rated limit and exposure to high temperatures. By choosing to limit the applied voltage, such effects can be reduced. Ceramic capacitors are one of the most common types of capacitors that are in use today thanks to their compact packaging Read Article
Resistor Derating to Improve Mean Time Between Failure Resistor Derating to Improve Mean Time Between Failure All resistors have a specified power rating that determines the maximum energy they can convert without its performance degrading or the component failing. Read now to learn more. Read Article
Methods to Protect your Circuit Methods to Protect your Circuit Overvoltage, overcurrent, and heat are the three most likely events that can destroy our expensive silicon-based components or reduce our product’s life expectancy. The effects are often quite instant, but our product might survive several months of chronic overstress before giving up the ghost in some cases. Without adequate protection, our circuit can be vulnerable to damage, so what should we do? Or do we need to do anything? For instance, if Read Article
Low-Cost Verification for Digital and Analog Filters Low-Cost Verification for Digital and Analog Filters In Low Cost Solutions for Automated Hardware in the Loop Testing, we reviewed the idea of using low-cost testing devices to validate our hardware designs. In this article I want to zoom in on a specific application that can have a high barrier to entry when it comes to verification: Digital Signal Processing (DSP), specifically signal filtering. Rather than belabor the topic of DSP I will define it simply as “digitizing signals that come into Read Article
PCB fabrication notes Decoding PCB Fabrication Notes Your PCB fabrication notes contain important information that ensures your board can be manufactured exactly as you intend. See what you should include and what these mean. Read Article
AltiumLive Co-locates with IPC Apex Expo AltiumLive Co-locates with IPC Apex Expo Two executives are joining us in today’s episode. Ted Pawela of Altium and IPC VP Dave Bergman. Join us and learn what’s coming in AltiumLive 2022 and IPC Apex 2022. Read Article
connect grounds power supply How to Connect Grounds in an Isolated Power Supply PCB Layout Your isolated power supply PCB layout should still have connected grounds, but how can you physically make this connection? Learn more in our guide. Read Article