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Weekly Digest: Is that a Lucky Board or Did You Just Switch to Altium Designer? Weekly Digest: Is that a Lucky Board or Did You Just Switch to Altium Designer? Are you switching from OrCAD, PADs or Eagle to Altium Designer®? Lucky you! Click on the links for helpful resources, or keep reading to see everything we published this week. We have content from Happy Holden and other industry experts on the Altium PCB Design blog this week. We’re bringing the top industry voices together to provide you with Expert News at design time. PCB Industry Expert Series on the PCB Design Blog This week we highlighted a Read Article
Weekly Digest: Altium Industry Experts Series Weekly Digest: Altium Industry Experts Series Did you read the flex circuit articles by Tara Dunn this week? You won’t want to miss it! We also have articles from Happy Holden along with a stellar podcast with special guest Tyler Mincey from Bolt, a hardware accelerator that backs entrepreneurs at the intersection of software and physical products. This week we’re excited to share new Industry Expert articles about Flex Materials, Vertical Conductive Structures and more. Read on, or add to Read Article
Weekly Digest: Altium EDA tools at Embedded World Weekly Digest: Altium EDA tools at Embedded World Embedded World Conference 2019 was on everyone’s mind this week. With so many future-oriented technologies and solutions, the conference brought out the best new ideas. As a part of the community, we were eager to share our technology with embedded system developers and product managers looking for fresh perspective and future-friendly EDA tools. Watch our Embedded World highlights video to get a quick recap of the event and take a look at some Read Article
Weekly Digest: Articles, Podcast and Videos from Altium Weekly Digest: Articles, Podcast and Videos from Altium We’ve collected everything published this week to bring our readers resources to read, watch and listen to all in one place. On the Podcast we introduced a new format so we can invite engineer Ben Jordan on the show more often to take questions from the audience. We also have new articles on the blog and several new videos all about Altium 365. This OnTrack Podcast with Judy Warner This week on the OnTrack Podcast, Judy Warner and Ben Jordan Read Article
Weekly Digest: Expert Articles and Altium Designer Youtube Videos Weekly Digest: Expert Articles and Altium Designer Youtube Videos We’ve collected everything published this week to bring our readers resources to read, watch and listen to all in one place. This week we have two new articles from thought leaders that we think you’ll like. Take a look and join the conversation on social media or in the comments section of the articles listed below. Articles on the PCB Design Blog For the avid reader, there’s never a shortage of informative articles on our PCB Design Blog. Check Read Article
What You Need to Know About Choosing Embedded Modems for IoT What You Need to Know About Choosing Embedded Modems for IoT IoT enables you to control devices over the internet. If you grew up in an era where the Internet existed without Google, you may be as amazed as I am to see how far technology has evolved. It would have been beyond my wildest imagination to think about machines conversing intelligently on the Internet without much human intervention. Back when I was introduced to the online world, it took several minutes to simply load a single page of sports Read Article
AutoRouter and Massive Potential for Routing Ease AutoRouter and Massive Potential for Routing Ease I once owned a little pop-up tent trailer, and hooking it up to my car was a very involved process. My wife would use a combination of hand signals and shouted instructions to guide me in as I moved the car back and forth in order to position the hitch perfectly under the trailer coupler. One day my father in-law-was helping me and I started my lengthy explanation to him of the hitching process. Without saying a word he simply reached down Read Article
Carry Propagation Delay in High Speed Data Processing What is Carry Propagation Delay in High Speed Data Processing? I sometimes get into text message conversations with friends that go completely haywire. It’s too easy to ask five questions back and forth in a single text, and trying to respond to everything causes our message chain to go completely out of sync. It isn’t until three text messages later that I actually respond to everything my friend asked, and by then we’ve moved on to a completely new topic. Signal delay between logic circuits in a PCB or an Read Article
Comparing Electronic Prices with Supply Chain Visibility Comparing Electronic Prices with Supply Chain Visibility Thankfully, I’m no longer a broke college student that has ramen every other day for dinner. But the spending and budgeting habits I developed during that period of my life have stuck with me and served me well into adulthood. I’m not eating ramen anymore, but I still keep an eye on my monthly budget. If you’re considering which components to include in your next PCB and are trying to formulate a production budget, you’ll need access to supply Read Article
Impedance and PCB Etching: Utilizing Altium Designer for Your Board Needs Impedance and PCB Etching: Utilizing Altium Designer for Your Board Needs Today’s high-speed PCB designs require that the design engineer take charge of how the circuit board will be built. There was a time where PCB construction specifics were handled by manufacturing engineers in another department, or even in another company. How the board was built up didn’t have an important effect on the signal performance, and the purpose of the design team was to simply create electrical circuitry that performed the function Read Article
Preparing for Manufacturing with PCB Panelization Software Preparing for Manufacturing with PCB Panelization Software If you work in manufacturing or you plan to produce a new product, productivity is the name of the game. Ever since the Industrial Revolution, the focus has been producing more widgets per man hour, and PCBs are no different. When you’re bringing a new product to market, why pay more for your order than you need to? One way to improve productivity in a PCB manufacturing process is to use the proper panelization scheme. If you have the right PCB Read Article
Creative Design with Buried Vias in Your Next HDI PCB Creative Design with Buried Vias in Your Next HDI PCB Once I learned how to use different types of vias on my PCBs, I found that my routing strategies greatly improved, and I was able to reduce my overall board size. Judicious use of the right vias lets you place connections only between the layers you absolutely need for your board to function, instead of making connections that aren’t necessary. As newer devices pack more functionality (and more components) onto a single board, vias are Read Article
Optimizing Electronic Product Documentation for Assembly and Manufacturing Optimizing Electronic Product Documentation for Assembly and Manufacturing I’m the kind of person that can get overwhelmed with too much information. If my wife gives me a choice of restaurants to pick from when we go out to dinner, it feels like my head might explode. Burgers, pizza, tacos, chicken, deli sandwich, family-style, Lo Mein, seafood, steaks… my usual response is to look at her and say; “what were my choices again?” She has learned over the years to instead say; “I’m hungry, do you want a burger or some Lo Read Article
Utilizing Layout Options for Rigid-Flex Design Utilizing Layout Options for Rigid-Flex Design If you own an electronic device that folds, bends, twists, or deforms in some way, it most likely contains a rigid-flex PCB. These circuits contain many of the elements in any PCB, like traces, vias, and even components mounted on a flexible ribbon. However, getting started with a comprehensive design for these circuits requires the right software specifically built for rigid-flex boards. Form factors are becoming more specialized and demanding Read Article
Weekly Digest: Printed Electronics and PCB Design Weekly Digest: Printed Electronics and PCB Design We’ve collected everything published this week to bring our readers resources to read, watch and listen to all in one place. This week we’ve explored Printed Electronics on the podcast by discussing materials and modern applications of the technology. We’d like to take an opportunity to share a few other recent resources on the topic: Printed Electronics Whiteboard Video with David Marrachki How to Design Printed Electronics in Altium Designer 19 Read Article
Choosing Equivalent ICs in Your PCB How to Find Equivalent ICs in Your PCB When I was younger, I would routinely open up old or broken electronics just to see how they worked. I didn’t start to understand how they worked until I was older, but I always marvelled at the mass of components and the complexity with which they were laid out on a circuit board. I would even have fun connecting from different devices in the hopes that I could resurrect a broken device. ICs in your PCB have a number of specifications that must Read Article
Adding Fabrication Tolerance Options to Your Manufacturer Deliverables PCB Manufacturing Tolerances: Adding Fabrication Tolerance Options to Your Manufacturer Deliverables Much as we would like, no manufacturing process is perfect. Every process produces slight errors in part sizes or placement, and PCBs are no different. Since some PCB applications have very tight tolerances, you’ll need to specify your tolerance requirements for your manufacturer. Let alone maintaining secure understandings of solder mask and solder placement, material thickness specifications, or any surface mount components - designating your Read Article