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The most powerful, modern and easy-to-use PCB design tool for professional use

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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.

Sharing PCB Data with Manufacturers in the Cloud Once you’ve finished your new project and you’re ready to push it to your manufacturer, you’ll normally be stuck in an endless email chain with an engineer, or you’ll have to share cloud links with each other. Personally, I find the long email chains and long list of links overwhelming, especially when I have plenty of other tasks that require my attention. Sharing PCB data with manufacturers shouldn’t be a headache, it should be a seamless Read Article

Getting Started in Altium Designer | Changing the Rules! The Altium Designer environment is controlled by rules, which are created using a powerful tool called the “PCB Rules and Constraints Editor”. By creating rules before component placement and routing starts, Altium can warn you or prevent you from making mistakes, depending on how your preferences are set. If rules are changed midstream, Altium’s sophisticated Design Rule Checker can highlight violations based on the revised rules, and report Read Article

Are We Poised on the Brink of a New Age? A new material shaped like a one-dimensional DNA helix can be used to build transistors with diameters of only two nanometers. Read Article

The Moon by 2024, Mars by 2040, and Then? It seems the chances are improving that we will one day become a true space-faring species. Read Article

Design Reliable Multiple Stack Microvias Like a Pro In this podcast episode , learn how Gerry Partida and his team at Summit Interconnect made a compelling new discovery about the reliability of multiple stacked microvias. Watch it now. Read Article

Online Educational Resources for Mastering PCB Design Ben Jordan, “Dean of Altium Academy”, shares details about the central hub for educational resources: documentation, videos, and tips for mastering your Altium software. Read Article

OnTrack Newsletter: COVID-19, Virtual Education, and Blogs - April 2020 OnTrack Newsletter April 2020 VOL. 3 No 11 What Impact will the Coronavirus have on Your Designs? Around the world, we’ve all felt the sting of COVID-19 on safety, health, travel, global markets and our workplace. Wondering what impact this may have on design engineers, we reached out to Mike Buetow, the Editor-In-Chief for PCD&F (Printed Circuit Design and Fabrication) and Circuits Assembly magazines to learn about his viewpoint on what Read Article

OnTrack Newsletter: Rogers Corp Growth, RF Design and Brain Food - March 2020 OnTrack Newsletter March 2020 VOL. 3 No 10 Rogers Corporation: The Company Behind Top Performing Laminates If you design PCBs for high-speed digital, RF, Microwave or Millimeter Wave applications, you’re probably very familiar with Rogers laminates. However, did you know Rogers Corp has doubled in size in the past 10 years? Recently, while I was at IPC APEX Expo, I had the opportunity to interview Tony Mattingly, Sr. Product Manager and learn Read Article

OnTrack Newsletter: Engineering Stories, RF Design and Brain Food OnTrack Newsletter February 2020 VOL. 3 No 9 New Engineering Mini-Documentary Series: Altium Stories Too often, in the pursuit of healthy success and growth, it’s tempting for companies to talk about its products or services too much, and their customer’s success too little. While Altium may certainly fall into this all-too-common trap at times, we truly draw our greatest inspiration from innovative engineers like you, who are impacting the world Read Article

The EMC Doctor is in: Ken Wyatt on EMI and PCB Health The OnTrack Podcast welcomes Ken Wyatt (also known as ‘the EMC Doctor’). Ken is an EMC Engineer, a prolific author on EMI/EMC related topics, and an industry consultant. Read Article

Industry 4.0, Artificial Intelligence, and IoT in Manufacturing When it comes to electronics, consumer devices like smartphones and Alexa tend to get all the attention. However, according to Alun Morgan at Ventec International Group, “about 23% of PCBs produced worldwide are used in electronics equipment for manufacturing applications.” The numbers only go up when you include other non-consumer categories that support manufacturing operations, such as automotive, telecom, power generation/distribution, and Read Article

Lane Recognition and Tracking with NVIDIA Jetson Nano Autonomous vehicles are slowly becoming an important part of the automotive industry. Many believe fully autonomous vehicles will soon be driving alongside humans, and technology companies are in a race to deploy fully autonomous vehicles. In December 2018, Waymo, the company that emerged from Google’s self-driving car project, officially started its commercial self-driving car service in the suburbs of Phoenix. Companies like May Mobility, Drive Read Article

Production-Grade Battery Modules for Raspberry Pi Zero I’ll admit, I’m a big fan of Raspberry Pi. This set of inexpensive boards packs plenty of general purpose computing power into a small form factor, it easily connects to a LAN/WiFi and is accessible via SSH, and its memory is easily expandable with a micro SD card. It’s also easy to get a new prototype embedded application up and running directly from your laptop. The one aspect that prevents its application as a production-grade embedded system Read Article

PCB Design Review and Collaboration in Altium Concord Pro Remote collaboration tools are everywhere these days, and now designers have access to a convenient collaboration system for electronics design. Whether you’re part of a design team, or you need to quickly execute any design changes recommended by your manufacturer, you need cloud collaboration tools that are immediately accessible within your PCB design application. Now with Altium Concord Pro, you’ll have access to a cloud-driven design Read Article

Differential Pair Length Matching: Best Practices for Signal Integrity Take two signals and send them down a parallel bus or differential pair. How can you be sure the downstream receiver will latch to your signals? If your signals don’t arrive at the same place and at the same time, then gates in your receiver won’t latch at just the right moment. This delicate balance can be like walking a tightrope across a cliff, and it can be difficult to maintain differential pair length matching by eyeing your trace lengths Read Article

How Do Capacitor Mounting Structures And Footprints Impact Total Inductance? In this blog article we discuss the inductance of the capacitor footprint along with the inductance of vias from the capacitor footprint to the PCB power planes. Read more. Read Article

An Overview Of PCB Outer Layer Processing Expert Kella Knack describes in detail the fabrication of the PCB outer layer. Read and learn about how different vias are formed and the steps involved in the multilayer build-up process. Read Article