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PCB Design

Rigid-Flex PCB Design - A Fabricator’s Perspective

Rigid-Flex PCB Design - A Fabricator’s Perspective Do you have all the knowledge you need to design not just a proper rigid-flex PCB, but one that’s efficiently optimized for your manufacturing process? Learn how to avoid the 7 most common rigid-flex design mistakes from the manufacturing experts at Sierra Circuits! As PCB designers, we commonly approach rigid-flex design from our limited perspectives, concerning ourselves with streamlining workflows, saving space on board layouts, and choosing Read Article

6 Things for Your PCB Design Library

6 Things to Have in Your Team’s PCB Design Library Components form the building blocks of our Printed Board designs, and making the right component selections can make or break a project’s budget. Are you doing everything you can to ensure that your design is both maintained and updated on a regular basis? More importantly, how are you ensuring that only approved, ready-to-use components are being used in your current PCB designs? Read on as we reveal the 6 things you need to have in your team’s Read Article

Announcements: Altium Designer 15.1 Released

Announcements: Altium Designer 15.1 Released We are excited to announce the release of Altium Designer^®15.1, which includes new features and enhancements focused on productivity, documentation, and high-speed design. What’s New for High-Speed Design Altium 15 was all about improving the high-speed design process, and we’re taking that a step further in 15.1. Creating length matching rules is easier than ever with the new xSignals^® Wizard , which will automatically configure your length Read Article

Making friends with differential pairs

Making Friends with Differential Pair Schematics A question arises when working with differential pairs, particularly when you inherit or import designs where the differential pair directives were not added to the schematics. Is it actually necessary to set up the directives in the schematic documents? In order to use the schematic Differential Pair directives in Altium Designer^® , a specific naming convention must be used. The negative and positive signals of the pair must follow the Read Article

New Productivity Features to Take Advantage of in Altium Designer 15.1

New Productivity Features to Take Advantage of in Altium Designer 15.1 Since the first release of Altium Designer^® back in 1985 with Protel^®, our focus has always been on improving your design productivity. Getting those designs from concept to completion as quickly and easily as possible is always a concern of yours, and a focus of ours in each new version of Altium . At the core of Altium 15.1 is a set of new features that we’ve been hard at work on. Without further ado, we’d like to present the new productivity Read Article

How to Avoid the Most Common Errors in Your Schematic Design Process

How to Avoid the Most Common Errors in Your Schematic Design Process There are over 100 errors a PCB designer can make in the schematic design process. Are you catching them all in your current design criteria review process? Read on to find out how you can better catch some of the most common PCB design mistakes. A Decade of Differences Schematic designs review processes were a lot simpler 10 years ago, and the schematic review process to check for errors didn’t seem to require such a huge dedication of man-hours Read Article

How to Avoid Common PCB Signal Integrity Issues in Your Designs

How to Avoid Common PCB Signal Integrity Issues in Your Designs Learn the common PCB signal integrity approaches to help eliminate basic system level failures. Read Article

Implementing Atmel QTouch with Altium Designer

Implementing Atmel QTouch with Altium Designer Increasingly, I am being asked how to go about designing a touch application using Atmel's QTouch technology. I’ve also had a lot of people ask if it’s possible to develop such an application on a NanoBoard^® 3000. Well it certainly is, and I thought I would take a moment and map out the overall aspects and options of implementing an Atmel QTouch design, including development. With Altium Designer^® 10, we introduced support for the automatic Read Article

PCB Production File Format Wars

ODB++ vs. Gerber X2 vs. IPC-2581: PCB Production File Format Wars There's been a lot of excitement among PCB Designers and Fabricators over the last year about new PCB design and manufacturing hand-off. People tend to fall into one of four camps: Stay with Gerber RX-274X (the status quo), stay with / switch to ODB++ (Mentor's format), adopt the upgraded Gerber X2, or adopt the new IPC-2581 standard. No matter which camp you fall into, one things really clear - most of the scrap, wasted time, and manufacturing Read Article

Migrating from Altium Vault Server 1.2 to Altium Vault 2.0

Migrating from Altium Vault Server 1.2 to Altium Vault 2.0 Yesterday we released Altium Vault^® 2.0. As Nikolay mentioned, organizations using the Altium Server with Subscription are eligible to upgrade to Altium 2.0. After you’ve contacted your Sales & Support Center, the next thing you’ll wonder about is just how do you go about migrating your data to the new Altium 2.0. It’s pretty easy actually; I did it for myself in about an hour yesterday afternoon and documented the process, which I’d like to Read Article

Multi-board design projects in Altium Designer

Multi-board design projects in Altium Designer I was working with a customer recently who had two PCBs that were related. In this multi-circuit boards design project he wanted to work from a single schematic package, yet have a subset of the schematics populate two different printed boards. It’s enough of a scenario, and it’s reasonably simple to achieve in Altium Designer^®. Here’s how. At the time of publishing, Altium currently supports only one PCB per PCB Project. In other words, each PCB Read Article

Collaborative Design Part 3: Crossing the ECAD/MCAD Bridge

Collaborative Design Part 3: Crossing the ECAD/MCAD Bridge Interfacing between electrical and mechanical design software is one of the most important forms of design collaboration in modern electronic design. As PCBs become smaller and more dense, and as mechanical housing restrictions become tougher, there is a great need for seamless design data transfer. For the third installment in this blog series, we'll take a look at some of the options available for crossing the boundary between electrical and Read Article

Is Your Company Data as Secure As Pictures of Your Food?

Is Your Company Data as Secure As Pictures of Your Food? Consumer products such as smartphones carry priceless data of sentimental value and accordingly service providers offer backup services for their customers. In the business world, our data too is priceless in it's own way, in a way where it's much easier to attach a dollar amount to the value. So what are you doing to ensure your valuable data is taken care of? Every piece of data on my iPhone is automatically backed up. Your company data is Read Article

How to use Schematic CAD Drawings for Cable Assemblies: Part 4

How to use Schematic CAD for Harness Drawings and Cable Assemblies: Part 4 Sainesh Solanki continues his blog series on using Schematic CAD tools for cable and wiring harness design. In this 4th installment, Sainesh discusses how to clearly lay out the cable assembly drawing on the schematic page, along with the electrical schematic for generating a netlist for testing and DRC later on. Read on to find out how you can be using schematic CAD drawings for cable assemblies. Doing the cable assembly drawing in a Printed Read Article

How to Route DDR3 Memory and CPU fan-out

How to Route DDR3 Memory and CPU fan-out It's becoming more and more inevitable that board designers have to do high edge rate (high speed) PCB designs when working with microcontrollers. With the power of CPU's like the Freescale iMX6 multi-core ARM device family, but at very low "cost per MIP", it's more and more desirable to use devices like this to enable rich software and user experiences in your product. But using these super-micro added memory controller bears with it the Read Article

Using Configuration Management to Reduce Design Errors and Promote Re-use: Part 1

Using Configuration Management to Reduce Design Errors and Promote Re-use: Part 1 A Configuration Management system can be used, along with an existing Design Data Management system, to further promote good data integrity. So just what is Configuration Management, and how can the general principles be applied to an electronic design environment? This blog series aims to answer some of the questions surrounding this topic, as well as provide a basic framework for easily integrating a useful Configuration Management system. A [a Read Article

How to use Schematic CAD Drawings for Cable Assemblies: Part 2

How to use Schematic CAD Drawings for Cable Assemblies: Part 2 The need to design cable assembly drawings often falls to the electronics design team, but for many, the use of high-cost dedicated cabling design software is simply out of reach and overkill. In this second installment of the cable design blog series, Sainesh Solanki reveals the needed design elements of the components used in great cable assembly drawings (you can access part 1 here). These schematic symbols and their associated parameters and Read Article