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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.

EMI Filter Simulation for Noise Suppression with Altium Designer 20 and Altium 365 Simulations can get very complicated, but Altium 365 helps you keep your simulation models and data organized. Read Article
How to Involve Customers in PCB Product Development If you’re a freelancer and you’ve led or managed a complex PCB design project, the need to involve your customer in the product development process may not be obvious. Your customer is probably a project manager at a bigger company, so they’ll be overseeing progress on the project and leading communication with you. If you work on a small team or as part of a large organization, involving customers in product development can be time-consuming Read Article
Transmission Line Transfer Function from ABCD and S-parameters High frequency and data rate channels can be routed as a mode-selective transmission line. Here’s when you should consider this routing technique. Read Article
Back Drilling in Altium Designer: One of the Easiest Ways to Improve Signal Integrity Back Drilling in Altium Designer is one of the Easiest Ways to Improve Signal Integrity. Click to see a Backdrilling example. Download PDF
Harness mmWave Routing with a Mode-Selective Transmission Line High frequency and data rate channels can be routed as a mode-selective transmission line. Here’s when you should consider this routing technique. Read Article
How to Setup HDI PCB Layout and Routing in Your PCB Design Software HDI PCB layout and routing seems more complicated than it really is. Here’s how you can get started with HDI layout and routing in Altium Designer. Read Article
Stripline vs. Microstrip Width for Desired Impedance: Are They the Same? Stripline vs. microstrip width values are quite different; they can’t simply be interchanged. Let’s break down why and what you can expect from your PCBs. Read Article
What's the Difference Between Data Rate and Bandwidth? The difference between data rate and bandwidth has been obfuscated for the last 30 years. Here’s how they relate. Read Article
Differential Pairs Without Ground: Is it a Problem? Some designers tell you that differential pairs without ground are acceptable. So who’s correct? We’ll examine the pros and cons of a differential pair ground plane. Read Article
What Goes into PCIe 5.0 Layout and Routing? Here are some PCIe 5.0 layout and routing guidelines for your next high speed add-in card and motherboard to support PCIe 5.0 devices. Read Article
Best Practices in Hardware Version Control Systems Read more about some best practices for using hardware version control systems in electronics design. Read Article
Signal Integrity for Mesh Ground Planes in Flex PCBs Even flex PCBs need a ground plane. Mesh ground planes can provide a 0 V reference in your PCB, but they have particular signal integrity requirements. Read Article
Bandwidth Requirements For Differential Signals This article provides an overview of the benefits of differential signaling and how it operates in a working electronic product. Read Article
Modeling PCB Interconnects as Causal Systems Real PCB interconnects are causal systems and must be modeled with the correct time-dependent behavior. Read Article
IoT PCB Design: It's More Than Just Hardware Development IoT products are lovely and sometimes frustrating products. Design teams need to be multifunctional to design these products successfully. They need to get the hardware, embedded software, web platform and/or app, and mechanical enclosure perfect if they want to see market success. Problems in any of these areas mean your new product will be substandard and, eventually, competitive products will win market share. So what does it take to ensure Read Article
The History and Use of Cross-Hatched Planes Read to learn all about hatch ground in your PCB instead of using ground planes. You'll learn about how this type of ground region impacts signal integrity. Read Article
The Benefits of High-Dk PCB Materials The terms “high-speed design” and “low-Dk PCB laminate” are often used in the same articles, and often in the same sentence. Low-Dk PCB materials have their place in high speed and high-frequency PCBs, but high-Dk PCB materials provide power integrity. Low-Dk PCBs are typically chosen as they tend to have lower loss tangent. Thus high-DK PCB materials tend to get overlooked for high speed and high-frequency PCBs. When we look at power integrity Read Article