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The Best EDA Software for PCB Design The Best Electronic Design Automation (EDA) Software for PCB Design You don’t have time for underperforming electronic design automation (EDA) tools that are difficult to learn and use, you need the best EDA software for PCB design automation that you can get; Altium Designer. But what is EDA software? ALTIUM DESIGNER The most powerful, modern, and easy-to-use EDA simulation software or electronic design automation software for professional use. You’ve got a job that needs to be done and that means the printed Read Article
Make Readable Silkscreen Layouts in Altium Designer Designing and Placing Silkscreen on your PCB with Altium Designer Silkscreen on a PCB is just one important part of planning for manufacturing and assembly. Altium Designer makes it easy to place silkscreen on your next PCB. Read Article
Designing with Shock Management for Avionics PCBs Designing with Shock Management for Avionics PCBs Of all the electronics application areas, there is one that needs to carefully consider mechanical and thermal shocks during design: avionics. An avionics system that is put into production within a satellite, aircraft, or spacecraft can experience strong vibration and mechanical shock during flight, and these systems need to be designed with high reliability in mind. IPC standards, MIL-PRF standards, and other standards specify some design Read Article
Customize Your PCB Drill Sizes With Altium Designer Customize Your PCB Drill Sizes With Altium Designer Every PCB will need some holes, vias, slots, and other features that are defined in a PCB layout. These features need to be reflected in fabrication documents, and designers need tools to help them automate this process of creating documentation directly from their designs. It’s easy to keep track of your holes, vias, electrical behavior, and much more in Altium Designer, the industry’s top PCB design application for professional design engineers Read Article
Design Your Metal Core PCB in Altium Designer Design Your Metal Core PCB in Altium Designer Most printed circuit boards use a thick FR4 core layer to provide structural stability and interior copper layers for a multilayer PCB. If problems like excessive heat and low thermal dissipation are required in your particular application, you might consider designing with a metal core PCB. You’ll see other advantages like greater structural integrity, as well as a natural EMI shield thanks to the internal metal core. These circuit boards Read Article
Leveraging the Free Footprint Community to Design at Lightning Speed Leveraging the Free Footprint Community to Design at Lightning Speed In this article, we reviewed a few different offerings of free footprint library resources for Altium Designer. We also briefly covered how to migrate those libraries to your Altium 365. Read Article
Designing 5G Devices Designing 5G PCB Devices The next stage in the evolution of mobile telephony is here with the roll-out of 5G. The designer looking to incorporate functionality to handle 5G signals into their circuits will face some challenging issues. So, what’s so special about 5G? The main change in the jump from 4G to 5G is the frequency band at which signals are transmitted. For 4G, this band covered 0.7 GHz up to 2.5 GHz. For 5G, this new band is an order of magnitude larger, with Read Article
Electrolytic Capacitor Lifespan 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
Estimating and Understanding Thermal Conductivity of PCBs Estimating and Understanding Thermal Conductivity of PCBs Your circuit board substrate and copper conductors are the primary factors that determine how heat will move around the board. Your components will generate heat during operation, illustrating the importance of estimating thermal conductivity of a PCB. The thermal properties of your circuit board substrate are one factor that determine temperature rise in your components (particularly junction temperature) and heat flux away from critical Read Article
Overview of Passive and Active Heat Dissipation Techniques How to Dissipate Heat: Overview of Passive and Active PCB Heat Dissipation Techniques Do you know which PCB heat dissipation techniques are best for your board? Here’s everything you need to know about active and passive PCB heat dissipation techniques and materials. Read Article
A Review of PCB Thermal Resistance Management with Thermal Vias Design of PCBs and thermal management are intimately linked as thermal problems are known to significantly reduce the useful lifetime of a circuit board and components. Heat that is generated in a circuit board by active and passive components tends to be confined near the components, leading to a high-temperature increase due to the low thermal conductivity of most circuit board substrates. Frequent cycling of a circuit board and components Read Article
PCB Thermal Resistance: Theory and Management PCB Thermal Resistance: Theory and Management The thermal conductivity of your PCB material stackup and arrangement of copper conductors are important factors that determine the thermal performance of your circuit board. You will likely need to include strategically placed thermal vias, a heat sink on each active component and power electronics, and active cooling measures near any other heat source on your circuit board. Copper in printed circuits has high thermal conductivity, while FR4 Read Article
Thermal Conductivity and Thermal Management for Printed Circuit Boards Thermal Conductivity and Thermal Management for Printed Circuit Boards The physical properties of your PCB substrates and copper conductors are the primary factors that determine how it will perform under pressure. Thermal properties, rigidity, dispersion, relative permittivity, and more will affect signal integrity, thermal management, and mechanical performance of your circuit board. When it comes to thermal conductivity, choosing the right substrate can help you combat temperature rise in your board with Read Article
How to Design with Thermal Pad vs. Paste in Your Circuit Board PCB Heat Sinks: Thermal Pad vs. Paste in Your Circuit Board Design Using thermal pads vs paste is an important decision when deciding how to best attach a heat sink to a power-hungry component like a CPU. Each of these materials gives the important benefit of heat transfer and reduced temperature, but there are other points to be considered when using a heat sink with a thermal pad or thermal paste. Assembly houses also need to know which option a design will use, requiring that clear documentation be provided Read Article
How to Design an AC to DC Converter Circuit in Altium Designer How to Design an AC to DC Converter Circuit in Altium Designer An AC to DC converter circuit does exactly as its name implies: it takes a harmonic AC input and converts it to a DC output. These circuits are simply from a high level and when operating at low power on a breadboard, but a real AC to DC converter circuit is more complex than just a transformer and rectifier circuit. Finding the right components for these circuits and running accurate power simulations takes the right PCB design software that Read Article
PCB Footprint Creation and Reuse with Altium 365 PCB Footprint Creation and Reuse with Altium 365 Many components come in standardized packages, but not all component manufacturers provide CAD models and schematic symbols in their PCB libraries. These CAD models show the location of pins, silkscreen information, centroids, and pads as they should appear in your PCB layout. PCB component creation can get repetitive when you need to apply an existing PCB footprint to a new component. With the component creation tools in Altium Designer and the Read Article
Managing Symbol and PCB Footprint Libraries with Altium 365 Managing Symbol and PCB Footprint Libraries with Altium 365 When you need to collaborate on printed circuit design projects, you have a few options for sharing data. Your projects need to contain schematic symbols and PCB footprints in order to be opened on another computer, and the old ways of sharing this data are inefficient. If you have access to a cloud application that integrates with your PCB design tools, sharing data becomes easy, and you won’t be prone to neglecting shared data. Altium 365 Read Article