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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.

Simulation Driven Design Can Solve Your PCB’s Signal Problems and More Simulation Driven Design Can Solve Your PCB’s Signal Problems and More If you work in the electronics industry or in research, there’s a chance that simulations are a regular part of life. While working in optics, we would simulate everything from wavefront aberration corrections to microscope images. I always fell back on simulations to better understand the complex systems we were building. Simulation-driven design is taking the idea of this same process comfort and applying it throughout the whole design process Read Article
PCB Ground Plane Design in High Performance Boards PCB Ground Plane Design in High Performance Boards Learn the best PCB ground plane design techniques to prevent signal and power integrity problems in this article. Read Article
Using Kirchhoff’s Law to Determine Sufficient PCB Trace Thickness Using Kirchhoff’s Law to Determine Sufficient PCB Trace Thickness For as long as I can remember, I've been a fan of peanut butter. Back in elementary school, my mom limited my peanut butter intake to a thin spread on a slice of bread. This didn’t come close to satisfying my cravings so I’d sneakily add a generous inch of peanut butter on sandwiches without my mom’s knowledge. My peanut butter thickness preference, unfortunately, did not help with PCB trace thickness in earlier days of hardware design. It wasn’t Read Article
How to Systematically Organize Your Messy Schematic Design How to Systematically Organize Your Messy Schematic Design Even as a six-year-old, my son is great at organizing his toys and personal belongings. At that age, I used to chuck all my possessions into a huge storage box. My son, on the other hand, has a knack for orderliness that borders on obsessive. Although his meticulous attention to detail can be mildly frustrating at times, it means that I can always trust him to keep his play area organized. In PCB design, you need to exhibit the same level of Read Article
Medical Technology Innovations and the Electronics That Enable Them Medical Technology Innovations and the Electronics That Enable Them Ten years ago, who would have thought one of the world’s largest medical equipment manufacturers, General Electric, would look to exit the industry and sell-off its medical equipment business? It is also a fact of life that changes like these tend to drive companies to look for profit opportunities in other industries. In the 21st century, with a rapidly aging global population, you have the likes of aerospace giants, such as Lockheed-Martin and Read Article
Embedded Passives Technology (resistors and capacitors) with Bruce Mahler from Ohmega Technologies Embedded Passives Technology (resistors and capacitors) with Bruce Mahler from Ohmega Technologies Learn about Embedded Passives Technology with Bruce Mahler from Ohmega Technologies. OhmegaPly® embedded resistor-conductor material is popular, but it’s not new. Ohmega has been making this product since 1972. So why is it getting so much attention lately? It’s reliable and has stood the test of time for five decades--but emerging technologies are making it more relevant than ever. Tune in to learn more about embedded passive and embedded Read Article
WARR Hyperloop Pushes Last Year’s Design Concept Even Further WARR Hyperloop Pushes Last Year’s Design Concept Even Further WARR Hyperloop team with Elon Musk after their 2017 win of the Hyperloop Pod competition II. Judy Warner: Please share briefly about the history of the WARR Hyperloop and the Technical University of Munich. Martin Riedel: WARR Hyperloop started out as a group of six students in the fall of 2015 and has since grown to nearly 40 students that compete in the SpaceX Hyperloop Competition every year. WARR Hyperloop is part of a larger student Read Article
Bill Brooks Accelerates Design-based Over Tool-based Curriculum Bill Brooks Accelerates Design-based Over Tool-based Curriculum Judy Warner: How long have you been designing PCBs and what led you to the profession? Bill Brooks: I’ve been designing boards since about 1970. My father introduced me to electronics. He was an aerospace professional working in R&D at Hughes Aircraft Company, UCSD, and later at Aerospace Incorporated. He decided to open up a printed circuit shop out of our garage in Vista, CA while I was still in junior high school. In 1969 he taught my brothers Read Article
Identifying Minimum PCB Trace Spacing and Width in Altium Designer Identifying Minimum PCB Trace Spacing and Width in Altium Designer Taking the time to set up routing rules to govern the minimum trace spacing and trace width for PCB layout can be tedious. Many designers would prefer to jump in and start trace routing without going through this setup process first. This can be dangerous though as you may inadvertently route a trace routing at the wrong width, or pack your routing in so tightly that you don’t have the room to make any width corrections later on. The more rigid Read Article
Developing 3D Printed Electronics to Minimize PCB Design and Manufacturing Costs Developing 3D Printed Electronics to Minimize PCB Design and Manufacturing Costs After moving to a new city, I couldn’t resist visiting the local library to pick up my library card and explore educational resources. As I walked in, the librarian cheerfully handed me a pamphlet on using a 3D printer. I was thrilled to see how easy it is becoming to access a 3D printer. Once restricted to research universities and high-budget labs, 3D printing is now ubiquitous. 3D printed electronics are also starting to become more reliable Read Article
Manufacturing Cost Tradeoffs with FR4 PCBs Manufacturing Cost Tradeoffs with FR4 PCBs My frugal nature means that I tend to be a slow shopper. I don’t go to the mall too often, but when I do, I spend too much time weighing the costs and benefits of two different pairs of jeans. Such neurotic behavior will probably annoy your spouse, but it pays to be neurotic when you are debating which material and board thickness to use in your PCB. Most designers consider the PCB fabrication costs associated with FR4 PCBs to be a rather simple Read Article
Use Interactive Routing to Mitigate EMI Issues from High-Speed PCB Traces Use Interactive Routing to Mitigate EMI Issues from High-Speed PCB Traces Having a robot clean the house and perform laundry chores continues to elude modern technology given intricate steps to complete each chore. Given the repetitive nature of the chores, you’d think robotic automation would be the perfect application to turn over to a robot. It turns out that cleaning the house and doing the laundry is much more complicated and too advanced for robot understanding. Only simplistic chores, like vacuuming the floor Read Article
Rigid-Flex Command Set-up and Layer Stack Design Rigid-Flex Command Set-up and Layer Stack Design Once you take that nose dive into PCB design, you start to realize how many of your home electronic devices actually work. From DVD drives to laptop monitors, and just about anything that folds, it is all made possible with rigid-flex PCBs. Rigid-flex PCB design can be a tricky beast depending on the software you’re using to create it, but at the end of the design, your printed circuit board will bend and flex like a gymnast. A rigid-flex PCB, at Read Article
The Cost of CAD Software: What Strong Design Tools are Really Worth The Cost of CAD Software: What Strong Design Tools are Really Worth We’ve all been there, we’ve bought the “bargain” product to save money only to find out that it didn’t meet our expectations. It’s one thing if the knock-off shirt we bought didn’t fit, but it’s a completely different story if the CAD tools that we invested in ended up not doing what we needed them to. There’s an old adage that says; “It takes money to make money,” and it is usually correct. The question in PCB design is: how much should I invest Read Article
PCB Routing Options to Maximize Design Adaptability PCB Routing Options to Maximize Design Adaptability Amusement parks often feature small raceways with gasoline-powered, two-passenger mini-cars going around a multi-lane track. Drivers can experience the thrill of steering and accelerating while trying to beat friends or family to the finish line. There’s a catch though. A rail-like barrier positioned in the middle of each lane prevents cars from moving from one lane to another. Consider the amusement park like a circuit: designing the amusement Read Article
Specialty Product Design Duplicates Success Across Campaigns Specialty Product Design Duplicates Success Across Campaigns No matter what stage of business you’re at, if one of your designs has turned from circuit board ideation to fully manufactured product then you’ve already accomplished a great deal. But, the hardware arena that you reside in will always have opportunities for product development, expansion, and growth. There are a handful of considerations that should be taken into account before you get too giddy. Product designs, to be specialized, have to Read Article
Surface Finishes on Printed Circuit Boards with Mike Carano, Chemist and Expert on Surface Finishes Surface Finishes on Printed Circuit Boards with Mike Carano, Chemist and Expert on Surface Finishes What finish should I use for my PCB Design? There’s no one single answer, it depends. Meet chemist and surface finish expert Mike Carano, the Vice President of Technology and Business Development at RBP Chemical, industry leaders in high-performance chemical technology. Mike emphasizes a key question when it comes to surface finishes, “What are the reliability requirements of the environment?” Learn about the chemistry behind different finishes Read Article