Altium Designer

Altium Designer

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Compare PCB Design Software Features For Your Device to Move to Manufacturing So you’ve just devised your new device that will revolutionize the world on the back of a cocktail napkin. Maybe your new medical device will have diseases running for the hills. Maybe you’ve got a great sensor for high-moisture environments. But how do you breathe life into your new product and finally implement your master plan for success? Those of us who have had such grand ideas are familiar with this dilemma. A PCB designer might know Read Article

Layer Stackup in Rigid and Rigid-Flex PCBs Building multilayer PCBs is like building with Legos. The all fit together easily, but you still need to follow directions if you want your design to stay together. Nowadays, only the simplest PCBs use a single layer, or a pair of top and bottom layers. Multilayer PCBs are now the norm rather than the exception, and manufacturers can fabricate PCBs with up to 30 layers. Layer stackup strategies in these boards are important for a number of Read Article

PCB Design Guidelines for Controlled Impedance Routing In June 1831, Sir James Clark Ross discovered the North Magnetic Pole on the Boothia Peninsula in Northern Canada. While the term “discovery” seems to indicate that the North Magnetic Pole is static, the North and South Magnetic Poles, in fact, move continuously. The Earth’s magnetic field changes over time and as those changes occur, the positions of the poles also shift. Given the rate of movement at 55 km per year, we may have another meaning Read Article

Coupled Versus Uncoupled Inductors: Which is Right for Your Switching Power Supply? I recently took a deep dive into the various types of topologies surrounding switching power supplies. This article examined the benefits and downfalls of some of the most common topologies and aimed to assist you in the process of choosing how to power your design. The SEPIC topology is a very common switching mode power supply that can operate as both a Buck and a Boost converter. In other words, the SEPIC can act as a step-down (Buck converter Read Article

Strong Design Software for Differential Pair Routing Back when I lived in Portland, I used to commute downtown, typically taking the train to and from work. I was thankful to live in a city with a meticulously timed train system. There must be a valid reason to route train lines as differential pairs because I could always count on the trains being on time. Routing differential pairs on a PCB also requires specific rules and meticulous timing that can only be achieved using the best PCB design Read Article

Kick Your EDA Translators to the Curb: Choose Unified Design Personal computing devices have significantly changed how bills are paid. And it’s getting better as utilities, banks, and medical enterprises get onboard with unified, intuitive user interfaces. Not long ago, moving from writing and mailing checks to using online banking for paying bills was excruciating. All the environments and web pages were slightly different. Even the simple process of paying a bill was inconsistent and there was no Read Article

Demonstrations for Multi-Layer Designs: Best Uses for Each Layer In your career as a PCB designer, you will design a lot of different printed circuit boards to accommodate various design technologies that you’ll be confronted with. To that end, you will use a plethora of circuit boards with all kinds of different sizes, shapes, and layer counts. How you decide to configure your PCB layers and what you put on each layer will, of course, be dictated by what you’re designing. Stripline and microstrip routing will Read Article

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

Ground Plane Design and Arrangement in High Performance PCBs I’ve encountered some interesting surprises while renovating my 1950’s farmhouse. When we moved in, we soon located a ground fault that periodically tripped a breaker on multiple appliances and the adjacent bedroom. Apparently, the electrician that installed the original wiring was an amateur. We got it fixed, but the experience reminded me how important good grounding is in electronics. Grounding techniques in Printed Circuit Boards encompasses Read Article

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 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 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

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

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 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