Getting Started

Just getting started with PCB Design and Altium? These resources help you get acquainted with all you need to know!

Altium 365 Getting Started User Guide - Available Now Hi Everyone, A month ago, I announced the release of the Altium Designer Getting Started User Guide. This week we are following up with the release of another helpful guide: Altium 365 Getting Started User Guide. The Altium 365 cloud platform offers the most connected experience for PCB design and realization with direct access from Altium Designer or any web browser. All active subscribers can access Altium 365 to unlock powerful functionality Read Article

Altium Designer Viewer Mode Datasheet Securely view, print, and cross-probe single documents or entire projects in one comprehensive interface. Download PDF

Level Up Your Design Skills - Altium Designer Getting Started User Guide We are happy to announce the release of the new Altium Designer Getting Started User Guide. Whether you are new to Altium Designer or you want to brush up on some topics, the Altium Designer Getting Started User Guide will take you from a beginner to a master in PCB design. This is only the beginning! This guide will be updated with new information based on user feedback. Let’s first go over the contents of the guide. Read Article

Creating a Ground Plane for Your PCB Design It used to be that printed circuit boards seemed to have the same basic layer configuration, or at least that’s the way I tend to remember it. This meant that they were usually six layer multi-layer boards, with a ground plane and a VCC plane. The old CAD systems didn’t really have the ability to do much with power planes except to designate layers as a bottom layer or the like. The most you would see in them would be some “X’s” where there was Read Article

Identifying Minimum PCB Trace Spacing and Width in Altium Designer Taking the time to set up routing rules to govern the minimum trace spacing and trace width for PCB layout can be tedious. Many designers would prefer to jump in and start trace routing without going through this setup process first. This can be dangerous though as you may inadvertently route a trace routing at the wrong width, or pack your routing in so tightly that you don’t have the room to make any width corrections later on. The more rigid Read Article

Getting Started with PDN Analyzer To learn more about this topic please see the full solution - Getting Started with PDN Analyzer - at Altium.com. Download PDF

How to Create a PCB Schematic | Altium Designer There’s an important step creating your PCB layout: How to create a PCB schematic? You might feel overwhelmed with all of the options, but don’t worry! Whether you’ve got decades of experience in your pocket or just starting your design or engineering career, your design begins with a printed circuit board schematic capture. Below is a schematic capture and creation tutorial in Altium Designer, a top rated PCB editor program. If you want to skip Read Article

Getting Started with PCB Design NOTE: This Guide was written for Altium Designer 18. For the latest Altium Designer has to offer, please visit https://my.altium.com/altium-designer/getting-started. This tutorial will start with a sketch of a circuit and will take you through the process of representing the circuit as a schematic, implementing the circuit as a printed circuit board, and generating the outputs required for board fabrication. TOPICS IN THIS SOLUTION CREATING THE Download PDF

The Advantages and Disadvantages of Active and Passive RFID Technologies When I’m designing a new PCB or product one of the hardest parts for me is choosing exactly which components I should use. It seems like every technology out there now has a different configuration to achieve the best performance. Even when you’re dealing with a fairly straightforward technology like radio frequency identification (RFID) circuit board there are a lot of flavors to choose from. While every type of RFID design label uses an active Read Article

The Best Multilayer PCB Design Tips for Circuit Board Layout Doing something new for the first time can be difficult. Baby birds probably don’t appreciate being pushed out of the nest and teenagers are nervous before their first real date. I, personally, was scared to death on my first date. However, I’m glad that I took that first step because that milestone was a great moment in my life. Designing your first multilayer PCB board may not be quite like a first date, but it's still a critical step for a PCB Read Article

A Guide to Challenging Projects Starting a project? Here's an expert advise from Mark Harris to get you through challenging design projects. Read this blog and see if this method will work for you. Read Article

Temperature Sensor Project: Intro In this project we will build a range of PCBs which will cover all the temperature sensor types and circuits to implement them. Read Article

Take the Risk Out of Prototype PCB Assembly (PCBA) Take the risk out of your PCB assembly (PCBA) with supply chain management. There is a special feeling one gets when polishing off a Rev A design and ordering the first set of PCBs from a board house. While designers everywhere would likely not trade that feeling for anything, taking some of the uneasiness off the table would probably be a welcome change. Here are review steps that should prove more effective at settling nerves than an after-work Read Article

Hardware-in-the-Loop Testing: An Introduction If you do a search for “Hardware-in-the-Loop” testing, you will frequently find examples of complex, real-time systems. This article from National Instruments, for example, gives a nice explanation and background on what hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) is, and provides an example of testing electronic control units within an automobile. In this article, we will be focusing on a smaller, more bite-sized version of HIL testing concepts. What is Hardware Read Article

Setting Up Concord Pro Revisions and Lifecycle Precursor To help PCB Designers to become better at what they do, there are various Blog series on Concord Pro which are presented in such a way that they are first broken into by categories. These categories walk through the entire process of efficiently using Concord Pro. At the end of each blog are practical steps you can take to get organized, and get the most out of Concord Pro for your PCB projects. Introduction We are continuing to set up Read Article

Leading a Team for Embedded Electronics Putting together a team, and the infrastructure to support embedded electronics design, requires an understanding of how every part works and how they interact. In this article I want to talk about how to build that team and provide some insight on how to build the infrastructure necessary for your product development. Definition: What are the different parts Designing an embedded electronic product requires pieces from different facets of Read Article

Building the Right Team for Electronics Design: A Deeper Investigation In Building the Right Team for Electronics Design: An Introduction we discussed the concept of creating a diverse team of people with a diverse set of skills. In today’s market, it is virtually impossible to build a team of homogenous engineers who can deliver from start to finish. Each engineer, possessing unique skill sets, contributes to the sum of parts within the design lifecycle. In this article, we will dive more deeply into the different Read Article