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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.

Constraint Driven Design versus Rules Driven Design in a Unified Environment Wouldn’t it be great if more rules in life were checked automatically? I love to cook Italian food, but it gets tiring going back and forth between a cookbook and a pot of tomato sauce. The only automatic rules checking mechanism in the kitchen is your oven timer. Fortunately for PCB designers, high-quality software packages include constraint and rules checking features that can check your layout and schematic automatically. The ability to set Read Article

How to Create a PCB Layout from a Schematic in Altium Designer You’ve done your usual excellent job of putting together the PCB schematic. The circuitry is defined and you are ready to go to PCB layout. But this time it’s a little different. Maybe your regular layout resources aren’t available, or perhaps you want to try to do your first layout yourself. Whatever the reason, you are ready to start working on the board side of PCB design, but you’re not sure how to create PCB from schematic Altium Designer Read Article

High-Speed PCB Design Analysis: Simulations and Signal Integrity Checks When end of summer rolls around, I gather my family and head over to the State fair for magical excitement. During the year, the fairgrounds are deserted, small dust whorls blowing across the barren landscape. But when the fair is on, the fairgrounds are bustling with activity. There are booths with elephant ears, buildings with animals and demonstrations, and there are amusement rides with screaming kids. It is quite the juggling act with all Read Article

Creating a Bill of Material with PCB Design Software using Altium Designer You’ve done it, your printed circuit board is finished and ready for PCB assembly. The schematic is finalized, the layout is checked and approved and you are ready to get this thing built. To do that though, you need to create a bill of materials. Fortunately, we are long past the days where these documents were created by hand. Every CAD system out there will automatically create a bill of materials through some library or other process. But Read Article

The Power of Assistive Technologies & Design for Assembly OnTrack Newsletter - June 2018 OnTrack Newsletter June 2018 VOL. 2 No 3 Welcome to the June edition of the Altium OnTrack newsletter! In this edition, you will be both impressed and inspired by some very young innovators who are profoundly changing people’s lives by designing and building medical assistive devices. In Design Like a Girl, you will meet Mary Elizabeth McCulloch and learn about her speech-generation device startup, Project Vive. In Makerspace, you’ll read about Read Article

What's New In Altium Designer 18 Webinar Recap June 19 Altium Designer^® Webinar: June 19th In case you missed our Altium 18 live webinar, no worries. You can catch up here with the video recording and presentation slides. If you’re not a fan of videos I’ll try my best to summarize in the webinar notes bellow. Most of the key takeaways will be the same as the may webinar but do take a look at the questions as they’ll be different. For future webinars if there’s something you’d like to see add it to Read Article

PCB Routing Guidelines for DDR4 Memory Devices Follow these DDR4 routing and PCB layout guidelines to ensure signal integrity and correct timing for high speed DDR buses. Read Article

The Role of Embedded Capacitors in PCB Design Mention capacitance, conductors, and dielectric capacitors to a 7th-grade science class, and you may see glazed-over expressions and hear bored sighs. I mean, hey, sometimes I get this with adults and coworkers I’m talking to so I can’t say I’m unsympathetic to the kids, but I have to promise them that circuits and circuit boards are, truly, fascinating. To help students visualize how capacitors work, construct a simple capacitor from two sheets Read Article

Commodore 128 Principal Engineer, Bil Herd on Best Practices for Learning a New CAD Tool Bil Herd shares stories and design wisdom from years of experience as a hardware engineer, most famously at Commodore. He started out self-taught, then Bil accidentally started working around people even more brilliant than him and some of it rubbed off a little. Learn about his interesting journey from TV repair to Commodore, Hackaday and beyond. Today, Bil is self-employed and focused on networks, high-level architecture consulting and hardware Read Article

Avoid the First Pass Perils in Prototyping Runs for Your Electronics Anything worth doing is difficult, and hardware is no different. My first PCB for a hardware product crashed and burned several times before I got it to work as designed. Even after all of this work, we never moved beyond building functional prototypes. After your design and initial testing phases are completed, it is time to order your first manufacturing run. Improper testing and design means your first manufacturing run will be fraught with Read Article

Via Aspect Ratio: Design, Signal Integrity, and Manufacturability There is a certain beauty that exists in nature and can only be mimicked in PCB design. The golden ratio found in nature is a good example of a universal relationship that defines the aspect ratio of plants and animals. As with anything, PCBs can have layers to them: conductive layering, dielectric layers, barrier layers and with layers come drilling. And while via aspect ratios are no golden ratio, they have a beauty all their own and are Read Article

Annular Rings for PCB and Nonfunctional Pads: Should You Use ‘em or Lose ‘em? It’s spring cleaning time at my house. I have so much old stuff in my garage, and I can never decide what to get rid of and what to keep. The stuff I keep always has some kind of sentimental value, or it’s something that I think I’ll need later. Dusty old circuits and boards that I’ve kept around, an old computer I haven’t gotten around to cleaning off that I made some of my first CAD designs on - the life of a hoarding engineer. Annular rings in Read Article

Design Planning with Differential Pair Routing Software and Directive Symbols If the components on your PCB are like the organs in your body, then your trace routing between components are like blood vessels. What looks like a complex tangle of copper connections is actually a meticulously designed system that uses well-understood design rules. Your PCB design software can help you maximize your productivity while routing and prevent errors using directive designations. Great PCB design software doesn’t just let you set Read Article

CAD Layout Software for Modern PCB Design and Modern PCB Designers Back in the day, PCB designers drew schematics by hand. Instead of guiding a mouse, technicians used red and blue pencils to carefully draw pads and traces on vellum parchment paper. Their tools included a triangle, a T-square, and templates. Forget a thorough design process involving CAD tools, full team collaboration, differentiated schematic diagrams and circuit board designs - one was lucky enough to have a steady hand. After completing a Read Article

Auto-Interactive Routing to Overcome Obstacles and Other Polygons There’s no doubt about it, routing traces on a printed circuit board by hand can be a lot of fun. It’s an engaging challenge to make the routing as neat, tight, and correct as possible to give you the shortest routes with the best signal integrity. Once you are done you can take a lot of pride in knowing that your measured lines are perfect, you differential pairs are spot on, and everything looks great. The only problem is that level of manual Read Article

Dispel Confusion with Global Editing: Poor DxDesigner Usability Causes Confusion The world has turned the corner from linear to organic. The need for global editing within versatile environments continues to grow. It used to be I could keep one file in my office drawer to collect bills for the month. When I got paid, it was a simple matter to list the bills, add them up, and write the checks. These days, bill paying goes much quicker on the computer. But I’ve had to adapt to different steps on each utility website and Read Article

Analog Meets Digital: How Converters Can Make or Break Signal Performance We are born into a world of purely analog signals. The sound of a stream running through a mountain meadow, the brown color of dirt, that screaming baby next to you; all of these ‘signals’ are of an analog nature. Yet, we grow up and seem to spend most of our time attempting to turn these signals into a reproducible ‘digital’ copy so we can perceive them through a digital device. Analog and digital signal performance is necessary to keep in mind Read Article