PCB Design: Create 3D Component in a Footprint Library In today’s PCB design process, your design and CAD tool needs to be able to integrate mechanical design workflows into an electrical design tool. Read on to learn how to create 3D component bodies in a footprint library. In today’s PCB design process, you need to be able to integrate mechanical design workflows into an electrical design tool. Transferring inaccurate design data back and forth between the ECAD and MCAD worlds not only causes Read Article Ruminating Rigid-Flex PCB Design Learn about the finer points of rigid-flex PCB design with Altium expert Ben Jordan. Read Article The Fantastic Four Make an Appearance at the IPC Designer Council Couldn't make it to your last IPC Council meeting? Read about some of the great insights presented during this month's meeting including a look into the future of analysis in Altium Designer®. how's that? The Fantastic Four Make an Appearance at the IPC Council The Fantastic Four made a special appearance at the IPC Council - OC Chapter on Wednesday, March 2, 2016. Not the superheroes, of course, we’re talking about the four fantastic things that Read Article The Wild West of PCB Design - Part Choice Showdown Does your part selection process ever feel like a wild west showdown, where every stakeholder is out to protect their own self-interests at the expense of your own? Learn how to turn your part choice selections into a win-win for your entire design team with a new feature in Altium Designer® 16. Link Does your part selection process ever feel like a scene from a wild west movie, where every stakeholder is out to protect their own self-interests Read Article Altium Designer 16 Is Now Available Altium Designer® 16 is here! This release is available now as a free upgrade to all Altium Subscription customers and can be downloaded on the Altium Products Download page . Not an Altium Subscription customer? Contact our support team now to upgrade. This release is all about tapping into your true design potential and includes powerful new features to accelerate your PCB design workflow. From productivity-focused enhancements to intelligent Read Article Rigid-Flex PCB Design - A Fabricator’s Perspective Do you have all the knowledge you need to design not just a proper rigid-flex PCB , but one that’s efficiently optimized for your manufacturing process? Learn how to avoid the 7 most common rigid-flex design mistakes from the manufacturing experts at Sierra Circuits! As PCB designers, we commonly approach rigid-flex design from our limited perspectives, concerning ourselves with streamlining workflows, saving space on board layouts, and choosing Read Article 6 Things to Have in Your Team’s PCB Design Library Components form the building blocks of our Printed Board designs, and making the right component selections can make or break a project’s budget. Are you doing everything you can to ensure that your design is both maintained and updated on a regular basis? More importantly, how are you ensuring that only approved, ready-to-use components are being used in your current PCB designs? Read on as we reveal the 6 things you need to have in your team’s Read Article Announcements: Altium Designer 15.1 Released We are excited to announce the release of Altium Designer®15.1, which includes new features and enhancements focused on productivity, documentation, and high-speed design. What’s New for High-Speed Design Altium 15 was all about improving the high-speed design process, and we’re taking that a step further in 15.1. Creating length matching rules is easier than ever with the new xSignals® Wizard , which will automatically configure your length Read Article Making Friends with Differential Pair Schematics A question arises when working with differential pairs, particularly when you inherit or import designs where the differential pair directives were not added to the schematics. Is it actually necessary to set up the directives in the schematic documents? In order to use the schematic Differential Pair directives in Altium Designer® , a specific naming convention must be used. The negative and positive signals of the pair must follow the Read Article New Productivity Features to Take Advantage of in Altium Designer 15.1 Since the first release of Altium Designer® back in 1985 with Protel®, our focus has always been on improving your design productivity. Getting those designs from concept to completion as quickly and easily as possible is always a concern of yours, and a focus of ours in each new version of Altium . At the core of Altium 15.1 is a set of new features that we’ve been hard at work on. Without further ado, we’d like to present the new productivity Read Article How to Avoid the Most Common Errors in Your Schematic Design Process There are over 100 errors a PCB designer can make in the schematic design process. Are you catching them all in your current design criteria review process? Read on to find out how you can better catch some of the most common PCB design mistakes. A Decade of Differences Schematic designs review processes were a lot simpler 10 years ago, and the schematic review process to check for errors didn’t seem to require such a huge dedication of man-hours Read Article How to Avoid Common PCB Signal Integrity Issues in Your Designs Learn the common PCB signal integrity approaches to help eliminate basic system level failures. Read Article Implementing Atmel QTouch with Altium Designer Increasingly, I am being asked how to go about designing a touch application using Atmel's QTouch technology. I’ve also had a lot of people ask if it’s possible to develop such an application on a NanoBoard® 3000. Well it certainly is, and I thought I would take a moment and map out the overall aspects and options of implementing an Atmel QTouch design, including development. With Altium Designer® 10, we introduced support for the automatic Read Article ODB++ vs. Gerber X2 vs. IPC-2581: PCB Production File Format Wars There's been a lot of excitement among PCB Designers and Fabricators over the last year about new PCB design and manufacturing hand-off. People tend to fall into one of four camps: Stay with Gerber RX-274X (the status quo), stay with / switch to ODB++ (Mentor's format), adopt the upgraded Gerber X2 , or adopt the new IPC-2581 standard. No matter which camp you fall into, one things really clear - most of the scrap, wasted time, and manufacturing Read Article Multi-board design projects in Altium Designer I was working with a customer recently who had two PCBs that were related. In this multi-circuit boards design project he wanted to work from a single schematic package, yet have a subset of the schematics populate two different printed boards. It’s enough of a scenario, and it’s reasonably simple to achieve in Altium Designer®. Here’s how. At the time of publishing, Altium currently supports only one PCB per PCB Project. In other words, each PCB Read Article Collaborative Design Part 3: Crossing the ECAD/MCAD Bridge Interfacing between electrical and mechanical design software is one of the most important forms of design collaboration in modern electronic design. As PCBs become smaller and more dense, and as mechanical housing restrictions become tougher, there is a great need for seamless design data transfer. For the third installment in this blog series, we'll take a look at some of the options available for crossing the boundary between electrical and Read Article Is Your Company Data as Secure As Pictures of Your Food? Consumer products such as smartphones carry priceless data of sentimental value and accordingly service providers offer backup services for their customers. In the business world, our data too is priceless in it's own way, in a way where it's much easier to attach a dollar amount to the value. So what are you doing to ensure your valuable data is taken care of? Every piece of data on my iPhone is automatically backed up. Your company data is Read Article Pagination First page « First Previous page ‹‹ Page200 Current page201 Page202 Page203 Page204 Page205 Next page ›› Last page Last » Load More