Announcing Altium Designer 19

Created: October 5, 2018
Updated: March 16, 2020

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Recent Articles

What is high speed design

What is High Speed PCB Design? Learn more about what is high speed board design and how to successfully design and route your high speed printed circuit board layout. Read Article

EMI shielding techniques

EMI Shielding Techniques You Can Use in Your PCB Design Software Electromagnetic interference (EMI) is such a problem that governments around the world have placed limits on the amount of EMI an electronic device is allowed to generate or receive. Your electronic device needs to be designed to prevent unintentional radiation and suppress conducted noise up to a very high frequency value. This is not a simple matter of adding filtering on every circuit in your PCB layout, it’s about considering the entire Read Article

Guide to High-Speed PCB Layout Techniques in Altium Designer

High-Speed PCB Design Guidelines and Techniques in Altium Designer High-speed PCB layout and routing can be complex and requires many diverse considerations. Important high-speed layout techniques and routing guidelines for your design span everything from trace widths on transmission lines to ground pour clearances, return path tracking, defined characteristic impedance, and much more. Simple design software packages simply can’t handle all of these constraints at once, leaving the circuit board designer to Read Article

Importance of Signal Integrity for High Speed Designs in Your ECAD Software

Importance of Signal Integrity for High-Speed Designs in Your ECAD Software Your PCB design software can help you create boards to ensure signal integrity in high speed designs. Learn more about how Altium can help you. Read Article

Power Integrity Analysis in Your PCB Design Software

Power Integrity Analysis in Your PCB Design Software Power integrity problems can abound in modern PCBs, especially high-speed boards that run with fast edge rates. These systems require precise design of the PDN impedance to ensure stable power is always delivered throughout the system. Without carefully considering the PDN characteristic impedance, you’re at risk of creating ripple and noise in the power distribution network when fast signals switch states. Some designers might wonder what is Read Article

How to Ensure PCB Impedance Control During Routing

PCB Routing: How to Ensure PCB Impedance Control with Formulas and Resources High-speed signals and high-frequency signals both have one thing in common: the need for impedance-controlled routing on low loss, low dispersion interconnects. PCB impedance control can be difficult to achieve without the right set of routing tools and an integrated impedance calculator in your design tools. Most impedance calculators use a basic equation that does not accurately represent real traces on PCB substrates and does not correctly Read Article

Ensure Broadband Impedance Control and Signal Integrity

What is the High-Speed Signal Frequency Range and Bandwidth? High-speed signals have broad bandwidth, meaning the high-speed signal frequency range extends theoretically out to infinity. Although signals are band-limited when recovered by a high-speed receiver, your interconnect design should account for the entire signal bandwidth. In the past, this required complex simulations that could account for band-limiting effects in PCBs, including package parasitics and dispersion in a PCB substrate. Today, the Read Article

Designing Physical Layer Security for Military PCBs in Altium Designer

Designing Physical Layer Security for Military PCBs in Altium Designer PCBs for military systems are high performing beasts that must meet stringent design and performance standards. Military systems that store and process sensitive data require extra layers of security that goes beyond locking them in a secure enclosure. You’ll need to design your Printed Circuit Boards to be extremely resistant to EMI, route data so that it cannot be tapped passively, and include blacked-out chips to prevent attackers from Read Article

Circuit Board Design

FR4 Dielectric Constant and Material Properties Wondering what is FR4? FR4 is by far the most popular set of PCB substrate materials. Here is how FR4 dielectric constant and your material properties will affect your next PCB. Read Article

Transmission Line and PCB Track Design

Transmission Line and PCB Track Design Digital designs fall broadly into two categories: low-speed and high-speed. The category “high speed” does not necessarily mean a high clock rate. Rather, it refers to the rise time of the signal during switching, which leads to propagating wave behavior on long PCB tracks. When a PCB track gets too long, it needs to be designed like a transmission line, not just a simple conductor with DC resistance. Understanding how to design transmission Read Article

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