About Author

Tuomas Heikkila

Tuomas Heikkila is an electronics engineer with 15+ years’ experience. He holds MSc of Electronics from University of Oulu. During his career, Tuomas has designed hundreds of PCBs, flexes and printed electronics designs for automotive, industrial and consumer electronics. But it is not just designing, but he has spent thousands of hours in the lab verifying his PCBs not only by traditional oscilloscopes, VNAs and spectrum analyzers, but also validating these against environmental effects and EMC in an anechoic chamber. For electronics designs, in addition to Altium Designer, Tuomas utilizes full 3D electromagnetic/thermal simulator in PCB design flow for PDN, SI and temperature analysis.

Recent Articles

Electrical design rules

Customizing Performance-Based Electrical Design Rules in Altium Designer Electrical design rules go beyond manufacturing and assembly. PCBs also require electrical design rules that are based on a signals’ electrical behavior. Read Article

Know the Power Dissipation

How to Calculate Power Dissipation Understanding the power dissipation of an individual component, an electrical block, or even the whole electronics system is essential for electronics engineers. It is important not only to avoid exceeding the maximum limits of components but also to calculate unknown parameters in input or output sides because power dissipation is related to system voltage and current. In this article, I describe my practices for analyzing power dissipation in Read Article

PCB routing techniques

Altium Designer 20 Changed My PCB Routing Techniques I just finalized my first PCB design using Altium Designer 20®. At the same time, I tested some new AD20 features, and in this article, I’ll share my thoughts about new PCB routing tools which had the biggest impression on me: sliding, and any-angle routing. Having read about and watched videos on these PCB routing tools beforehand, I was eager to try them out. These new features have given me more options for my PCB routing techniques. New PCB Read Article

Design Philosophy in Printed Electronics Manufacturing

Design Philosophy in Printed Electronics Manufacturing In printed electronics, I think about design philosophy from a new perspective. My question about design philosophy is related to printed electronics manufacturing: do I optimize my layout for electrical performance or manufacturability, which may then mean compromises for electrical characteristics? In printed electronics design I need to make trade-offs between trace resistance, voltage levels, power consumption, and layout area. With proper Read Article

Know the Bandwidth

Know the Bandwidth: How to Find Bandwidth of a Signal This article relates to both printed electronics and PCBs. I acquired my bandwidth design techniques working in PCB design, and later applied the same principles to my printed electronics design. In this article, I’ll explain my knowledge of bandwidth, and how I was able to apply it to both PCBs and printed electronics. Before going into details on bandwidth, I think it’s worth revisiting what we in electronics mean by the term “signal”. For me Read Article

Designing Printed Electronics with Altium Designer 19

Designing Printed Electronics with Altium Designer 19 As far as I know, Altium Designer 19^® is the first electronics design tool that effectively supports printed electronics design. With this tool you can create printed electronics designs in the same level as with capabilities parallel to standard PCB designs, and to do that, Altium created electronics design features specific to printed electronics. With Altium Designer 19 you can define design rules according to production capabilities that will Read Article

What is Printed Electronics Design?

What is Printed Electronics Design? What is printed electronics design? The answer is simple: it is electronics design. You utilize circuit theories, mathematical calculations and computer-based simulations for doing electronics design. You design electrical functionality and performance for a product using printed electronics materials. The materials are the key point as the materials used for printed electronics have different electrical performance characteristics than those Read Article

46:09 Injection Molded Structural Electronics: Creating Smart Surfaces with Electronic Functionality Learn about Injection Molded Structural Electronics and creating smart surfaces from the experts at Tactotek. View the presentation slides: Sign up to pre-register for AltiumLive next year or try Altium Designer today. Watch Video