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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.

3 Key IPC Rules to Know, Follow and (Sometimes) Break Gerry Partida is joining us in this OnTrack Podcast episode. Watch it now or listen on the go! Read Article
Successful ECAD/MCAD Collaboration Practices In this article Zachariah Peterson, founder of Northwest Engineering Solutions, discusses how his company successfully collaborates with mechanical engineers outside of his firm. He shares practices and tools that have been most useful along the way. Judy Warner: Zach, as an engineer and the owner of Northwest Engineering Solutions (NWES), what challenges do you see as most prevalent and problematic for design engineers when it comes to Read Article
Creating Elegant and Readable Schematics A schematic drawing will not only tell your PCB design software what needs to connect where, but it also communicates the purpose of a circuit to other people. It’s easy to create a schematic, but it can be harder to make a helpful schematic that can be quickly and easily read and comprehended by the reader. Anyone reading your schematic diagram should not have to try and trace wires around to figure out what they do or need to unscramble a Read Article
What Influences Electrolytic Capacitor Lifespan? If you speak with a bunch of design engineers, you might quickly form the opinion that the electrolytic capacitor has a particularly dubious reputation. This view certainly hasn’t been helped by the so-called “capacitor plague” that occurred in the first few years of the new millennium. A faulty electrolyte mix used in these types of capacitors led to premature device failures, and quite often, a “bit of a mess” was made to the PCBs on which they Read Article
Must Have Rapid Prototyping Tools Suppose your job involves rapidly iterating designs or creating a wide variety of products for clients. In that case, there are some essential tools available that can save you a tremendous amount of time, bringing high engineering risk devices to completion successfully. Whether you’re working on internal projects or developing high mix devices for clients as a consulting or freelance firm, these indispensable tools will help you ship a higher Read Article
Transmission Line Reflection Coefficient View a numerical example of the transmission line reflection coefficient and how simulations can help you understand the results. Read Article
Thermal Management for Integrated Circuits As anyone who designs and builds electronic devices knows, the device will generate heat when it’s switched on. Wherever current flows through an impedance, energy losses will manifest themselves as heat, thanks to thermodynamics laws, whether in components, connections, wiring, or the PCB. The greater the loss, the greater the excess heat generated. While components with thermally enhanced packages are available to help manage any heat generated Read Article
Real-World Monitoring with Encoders Electrical devices don't tend to be useful unless they can interact with the real world, taking measures, producing outputs, or responding to events, for example. One functional ability that devices may require is the capability to measure physical movement. This may be a wheeled vehicle traveling across a surface or a fixed machine's shaft rotation. An encoder is a sensor that turns a position into an electrical signal. This position may be Read Article
Anatomy of Latitude Part Two: "Thread with a Needle” in the context of energy We continue to explore the magic of energy conversion in a PWM transducer. Why is it magic? Theoretically, as we saw in the previous section, the line stabilizer initially converts some of the useful power into heat, which makes the efficiency of the line stabilizer less than 100%, and it is expected for technical systems. Theoretically, in a PWM transducer this happens without losses, isn't that magic? A PWM transducer, like a tailor with Read Article
Anatomy of Latitude Part One: Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) as a Result of the Evolution of Linear Systems  Great Ideas and Smart Solutions There are different techniques in the world of technology to achieve various goals, both final and intermediate. Some techniques are so successful that they are commonly used with high efficiency. Electronics is no exception. Great ideas and ingenious solutions are found and applied in this area probably more than in other engineering fields. The greatest example is the use of Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) signals Read Article
Four Commonly Held Myths of EMC Design “Don't gap your ground plane, there's never really a good reason to do that.” Dr. Hubing our guest for today is an EMC expert with 30 years of experience in the industry. Watch this episode or listen on the go now. Read Article
26:26 CoDesigner and MCAD Component Placement We design products not just PCBs requiring effective collaboration between MCAD and ECAD engineers. We need to consider how we Watch Video
28:11 Using Version Control in Your PCB Project Webinar Version control has been a staple of software development for decades, but hardware development can benefit just as much from Watch Video
18:49 Communicating Design Intent with Manufacturing Outputs No one wants to do a board respin because of inaccurate or incomplete manufacturing outputs confusing design intent. This webinar Watch Video
Level Up Your Design Skills - Altium Designer Getting Started User Guide We are happy to announce the release of the new Altium Designer Getting Started User Guide. Whether you are new to Altium Designer or you want to brush up on some topics, the Altium Designer Getting Started User Guide will take you from a beginner to a master in PCB design. This is only the beginning! This guide will be updated with new information based on user feedback. Let’s first go over the contents of the guide. Read Article
50:48 PCB Component Placement Webinar Proper component placement is one of the most important aspects of PCB design. You need to familiarize yourself with the Watch Video
All About PCB Tooling Holes: What They Are and Where They Go Learn all about PCB tooling holes and mounting hole styles in your design and how they are used in the PCB manufacturing process. Read Article