Altium Vault

Altium's Vault technology provides the foundation for Altium's Design Data Management solution. Browse our resources below to learn more!

49:24 New Product Overview: Altium Concord Pro There are many risks if your library and component data are not managed efficiently and effectively. Inefficiency occurs when multiple Watch Video

PCB Design Tips: Should You Include an External Watchdog Timer (WDT) in Your Board Design Would you invest in an external mouse, keyboard, and a high definition monitor when your laptop comes equipped with these features? It’s a personal choice, especially when you want to turn your laptop into a portable workstation. My girlfriend, who’s starting her career as a professional accountant, dismissed my choice as a waste of money. In electronics, deciding whether to include an external watchdog timer (WDT) into your PCB design can be an Read Article

Printed Circuit Board Defects: Dealing with PCB Component Warpage Like many engineers, I was raised on the “Stars,” Star Trek, Star Wars, Stargate. I’m still occasionally surprised to realize how much these fictional worlds, my goals, and my vocabulary. For an entire semester, I didn’t realize that phasers, the ray guns of Star Trek, and phasors, the handy mathematical notation, were completely unrelated, even through some obscure nerd culture and even spelled differently! “Warp” is another that I haven’t quite Read Article

PCB Design Software Features To Consider Before making a decision on buying a home, you would probably ask a lot of questions. Is it close to the facilities and services that are important to you? Is it in a good and safe neighborhood? Will the layout of the house satisfy your needs? These are all important questions that need to be answered before you commit to living there. In the same way, buying new PCB design software deserves the same level of scrutiny. You will want to find out Read Article

Important Considerations in Your Embedded System's Master-Slave Communication Model It can take a few weeks or months to finish a working prototype of an embedded system. Sometimes I would spend days working on a single part of the project. However, when your boss is looking for updates every day, it can be particularly distracting and hinder your productivity. When I started my design company, I learned not to repeat these mistakes on my team. Like a human, embedded systems, like modbus slave and modbus master, come in various Read Article

New Altium Documentation So just how do you avoid creating a content dinosaur? Every so often, you stand back and ask, “is this working?”. Well, we’ve done that, and the answer was no. The content was simply too old, had too much missing, there were too many mistakes, it was too hard to find anything, and would take too much work to fix! It was old content that had started life being paper/pdf-based, which had not traveled well as it first moved to a wiki, then on to a Read Article

BOM Management Tools and Real Time Part Access: How It Will Help Your PCB Design for Manufacturability Have you ever been so ready to take off on a new project that you can’t wait to jump into it? Of course you have. As engineers that’s part of what makes us tick. We’ve got so many ideas running around in our head that we would rather forego sleep or food in order to create a design. Then it happens, some kind of delay forces us to lock up the brakes on our creative process. There are many scenarios that can do this, but one of the worst is when Read Article

High Voltage PCB Design Tips: Materials for High Voltage PCBs Along with designing electrical hardware and running for stress management, I’m an avid knitter. My grandmother taught me when I was in grade school, and I’ve taught a dozen or so people along the way. Before you can get to the fun part of actually knitting something, you have to select a yarn. Is it for a newborn? Then I want it to be soft, but also machine washable so the mom can actually use it without worrying about handwashing. Does it Read Article

Assessing the Post-Development Hardships of Uncontrolled Data Management For every, team, and business, getting to the release state should be the moment where you can breathe a sigh of relief. This moment, unfortunately, doesn’t always lend itself to joyful celebration. Project completion can mean a) you and your team have successfully constructed a design without any flaws in the documentation process and can now prep for its release, or b) you’ve successfully completed your design but realize a minor (or major) Read Article

PCB Circuit Products: Should You Design for Repair? As an engineer, I always feel like it’s a personal failing when I have to call someone else in to fix my stuff. Whether it’s electronics or the occasional bit of haphazard woodwork, I can’t ask for help until I’ve tried to sort it out. Plumbing, however, is another story. Then I call for help immediately. The problem with the impulse to fix your own stuff is that a lot of companies don’t actually want you to. I can’t count the number of times Read Article

Advanced PCB Design Solutions Require Short and Long Term EDA Software: PCB Design Tips & Tricks - Altium Audio Bites Altium Audio Bites, giving you bite-sized information that's easy to digest and apply to your everyday design tasks. From our PCB Design Tips & Tricks audio series here is: Advanced PCB Design Solutions Require Short and Long Term EDA Software. All our audio series are from real PCB designers in the field, detailing their day to day problems and experiences. We hope you can learn from this as much as we have. Give it a listen and let us know what Read Article

Managing Your PCB Work-in-Progress Data The recent trends of shorter product lifecycles have resulted in increased customer expectations that crave quick delivery of feature-rich products. Electronic companies that haven’t progressed their design process and remain stuck with the conventional way of managing their ECAD data find it to be very costly and inefficient. With market pressures that leave no margin for error, electronic companies that don’t address the needs of today’s Download PDF

How NASA Plans to Use 3D Printed Circuit Board Technology Editorial credit: Tony Craddock / Shutterstock.com Have you noticed how a 3D model has become a phenomenon? People seem to want to 3D print anything they can now. Maybe the 3D printing craze will collide with the Internet of Things and we’ll get a printed smart fork. While other people are writing about the 50 best things you can make with them and then throw away, I’m going to tell you how NASA hopes to use 3D printing. Between a rocket Read Article

Advantages of Flexible Circuits for Space Applications Sometimes people ask my why space travel is important. The answer seems obvious to me every night when I go to sleep. My pillow is made out of memory foam, which was developed by NASA. Their research efforts for space exploration have led to a host of other important discoveries and gadgets that we all benefit from today. Another useful technology that was originally developed for the aerospace industry is a flex circuit. Rigid flex and fully Read Article

Protecting your PCB from ESD Using Transient Voltage Suppressors: PCB Design Tips & Tricks - Altium Audio Bites Altium Audio Bites, giving you bite-sized information that's easy to digest and apply to your everyday design tasks. From our PCB Design Tips & Tricks audio series here is: Protecting Your PCB from ESD Using Transient Voltage Suppressors. All our audio series are from real PCB designers in the field, detailing their day to day problems and experiences. We hope you can learn from this as much as we have. Give it a listen and let us know what you Read Article

What is ESD and How Does it Affect My PCB Design?: PCB Design Tips & Tricks - Altium Audio Bites Altium Audio Bites, giving you bite-sized information that's easy to digest and apply to your everyday design tasks. From our PCB Design Tips & Tricks audio series: What is ESD and How Does It Affect My PCB Design? All our audio series are from real PCB designers in the field, detailing their day to day problems and experiences. We hope you can learn from this as much as we have. Give it a listen and let us know what you think in the comments Read Article

How to Prepare Your PCB for Outgassing in Ultra-High Vacuum Systems You’ve heard the phrase, “rain on your parade” right? When I was in high school I played saxophone in the marching band. Well, one night we had a competition and it ended up drizzling on us 2 miles into the 4-mile march. We had to run for cover. All that hard work ruined by a little rain. On Earth, condensation just makes us seek shelter, but in low pressure, it can spell doom for your experiments. You might not think about condensation in the Read Article