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Learn how to prevent the top 10 Design for Manufacturability (DFM) issues in your next PCB design project with these strategies. As a PCB designer, you manage a variety of different requirements and expectations.There are electrical, functional, and mechanical aspects to consider. In addition, the PCB has to be produced in a timely manner, with the best possible quality, at the lowest possible cost. And through all of these requirements, you...

When placing parts for a PCB design, the placement often leads to connections that will cross over each other. Although vias to other layers or slightly longer trace routing can be used to address a small number of crossover connections, a large number of crossovers, like those in the figure below, can make routing extremely difficult and time consuming. For more complex routing with larger numbers of crossovers, PCB designers typically...

PCB designers begin with a set of physical requirements and specifications regarding the board layout. Certain factors such as the clearance between components and other primitives, establishment of electrical connection, size requirements of traces and vias, are just a few of the requirements that must be followed when designing a PCB. The ever-increasing complexity of boards has made it nearly impossible to carry out this verification manually...

The key to successfully linking circuitry on a single schematic sheet with circuitry in a PCB design, including the components and routing, is in the designation of the components. When creating the two mating snippets in the schematic and the PCB, you need to create unique designators for the components. This paper illustrates the key to success in linking the two schematic and Printed Circuit Board snippets together, and will make reuse of...

Save time and eliminate the headaches associated with multi-sheet design by using hierarchical multi-sheet schematic designs. To learn more about this topic please see the full solution - Hierarchical Schematic Designs: Organization Is Golden - at Altium.com.

It’s difficult to communicate aspects of a printed circuit board design effectively, using only text and static images. This is especially true in today’s world of increasingly complex PCB design. However, the Altium Designer3D PDF flip book export capabilities take advantage of the native 3D format, as well as the ability to embed this format into PDF documents. Thisexport format grants users the ability to share a fully-rendered...

One task that has always proven difficult is moving electronic product designs from one design environment to another. Whether you’ve changed design tools or acquired designs from another company, there are a number of challenges involved in moving a project from one software platform to another, while maintaining design consistency. It’s a difficult and time-consuming process, but it has to be done. INTRODUCTION If a PCB designer has a...

The overall cost to produce a completed printed circuit board PCB can be broken down into several basic categories: The cost of manufacturing the blank PCB, the cost of components, the assembly costs, and the cost of test. That last one, the cost of testing the completed board, can comprise as much as 25% to 30% of the total cost of producing the product. SUMMARY Designing for testability in a PCB design (DFT) is a critical step in the...

Altium Designer provides you with the variety of methods you need to solve all different grounding challenges in all different design types. INTRODUCTION Grounding has proven to be one of the greatest challenges in modern Printed Circuit Board PCB grounding design. Circuits continue to become more complex over time, as new technologies make them smaller, and we continue to make the transition from analog to digital. And these smaller...