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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

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

Better PCB Routing - Highlight Nets Regardless how many PCBs I design, I always find myself having to regularly review network paths on schematics layer and trace routes on PCBs. The complexity reminds me of a maze where only one path is the right one for a particular network. It is imperative that all the connections are accurate as errors made here will come back to haunt you later in the form of redesigns. The best way to ensure network accuracy is by isolating it so that each Read Article

Crosstalk Elimination Techniques in Altium Designer Remember back in school when the teacher would ask the class a question and you actually knew the answer! You and a few other students would excitedly raise your hands hoping the teacher would call on you. And if you were lucky enough to speak first you felt vindicated for the time you invested studying while some of your friends opted for other activities like playing outside. Although being able to speak without interruption was elating, the Read Article

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

SMART System for Data Management I have seen it, and perhaps you have too, where excessive design problems and too many re-spins of a PCB design can be attributed to just one thing; improper data management. I worked with a company once that considered half a dozen board spins acceptable just to iron out all the library problems. These kinds of problems can be greatly reduced and even eliminated with careful data management. The SMART system spells out a data management process Read Article

Pipelining Your Design File Process with Manufacturing Output Files An effective PCB design process requires that every step be mapped out and connected together so that the data flows through the design naturally. This type of data management is also known as “pipelining,” and its intention is to guarantee that the design data moves systematically from step to step without any interruption. With advances in today’s PCB design tools the first part of pipelining PCB design data, the component selection process Read Article

Pipelining Your Design File Process; Component Selection Effective PCB design begins with having a good process flow mapped out. Also known as pipelining, this process will help to define each segment of the data management as the design moves through its different steps. Starting with component selection, the PCB design will progress systematically through schematic development, PCB layout, and finally manufacturing output data. Component selection is where PCB pipelining starts, however, and without Read Article

Design Rules to Fanout a Large BGA I have known people during my career who insisted on hand-routing every PCB design that they worked on. They would say that their manual routing performed better, looked better, and was just better in general. I’m not going to argue one way or the other on that, but I will say that there is one thing that can not be argued with; all of that manual routing took them a much longer time to complete then if they had used automated routers. With today Read Article

Working with IPC Compliant Footprint Models Industry standards have been a boon for the electronics industry. These standards give designers assurance that the components they select can be reused across their designs, specifications will be consistent, and that IPC-compliant manufacturers can build their boards using standard processes. It’s all about increasing productivity and ensuring your devices will work as you intended. The IPC 7350 series of standards (specifically, IPC 7351B) Read Article

Managing Net Connection Order from Schematic to Layout When I first started designing printed circuit boards, it was a very unorganized process. We would create the schematics in our department, and then the system administrators would work their voodoo and transfer all that data from us into the layout department. The layout guys were an even bigger mystery, working all hours of the night and day on these complex Unix machines that supported their CAD layout tools. We would communicate our design Read Article

Using Library Search Features for Easier Component Selection Components are those critical elements in your PCB that keep it ticking along and doing its job. Your component libraries contain all the information about available components in a single location, making it easy to add components to your board and use component information with your simulation and rules-checking features. Other design software packages like to separate these features into different programs, or they force you to use an external Read Article

Project Release Management within PCB Design Software You’ve worked night and day to get your PCB design done and finally, the last trace has been connected, the last silkscreen reference has been tweaked, and the final DRC has passed. It’s time to call it a weekend, right? Wrong. You’ve still got a boatload of work to do in order to get all of your output files created for your manufacturers. A lot of PCB design tool vendors provide different mechanisms for making the creation of output files Read Article

Using Rules-Driven Design to Control a High-Frequency Board There was a time where high-frequency design belonged to realm of specialized engineers who lived in a world all of their own. For those of us designing printed circuit boards we rarely ventured into this realm, and when we did we were very happy to turn over that portion of the design to those engineers. They would perform calculations based on formulas that seemed to originate from the mystic arts, and then direct us to how the circuit should Read Article

Design Layout Integration and What it Means for Your Printed Circuit Board Not all PCB design software is created equal. Your PCB design tools can come in a variety of interfaces, software programs, and workflows, and creating some consistency among tools can be a huge productivity booster. Design tools that are separated into different programs and that enforce different workflows will seriously hamper your productivity. When everything is separated into different interfaces, translating between programs creates the Read Article

Using Altium's PDN Analyzer and Incorporating Simulation-Driven Workflow If you’ve ever placed your hand near the vent on your computer, you can get a sense for the heat being created by the motherboard. Fans are designed to remove heat generated by the components on your motherboard, particularly by your CPU and GPU. The same effects occur in PCBs, even if they do not include components that consume a large amount of power. Power is consumed as it is delivered from the power source to the components, and power drops Read Article