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PCB Design

6 PCB Design Stats to Make You Look Smart around the Water cooler

6 PCB Design Stats to Make You Look Smart around the Water cooler By nature of your role on a team that designs and manufactures printed circuit boards, there’s a lot you need to know about PCB design, from rules of thumb to design for manufacturability to the fabrication process, and more. But how much do you really know about PCBs and how they’re used? Read on... By nature of your role on a team that designs and manufactures printed circuit boards, there’s a lot you need to know about PCB design, from rules Read Article

How to Automate Your Component Management Process

How to Automate Your Component Management Process How many times have you found yourself deep in a project, only to find that one of the main components is on backorder, or, worse yet, is in obsolescence? This happens to engineers every day, but it doesn't’ have to. Read to learn more about automating your component management process. How many times have you found yourself deep in a project, only to find that one of the main components is on backorder, or, worse yet, is in obsolescence? How Read Article

How to Improve Your Routing Techniques

How to Improve Your Routing Techniques With the routing protocol being one of the most time-consuming board layout tasks, designers need as many tools as possible for today’s complex design requirements. But with board layouts incorporating broad support of component, wifi signal and fabrication technologies in increasingly smaller components enclosure sizes that call for a specific router bit, how can we ever automate this time-consuming process? Read on to get a look into how you Read Article

5 Myths about PCB Design-Busted!

5 Myths about PCB Design-Busted! Our industry changes everyday, and we need to make sure we keep up. Design constraints today may not be an issue tomorrow, so make sure you’re following fact and not fiction. Here are 5 myths of PCB design. There are a number of guidelines to PCB design, to help you create circuit boards that are low-power, bug-free, and generally functional. Some of these guidelines can be bent occasionally, depending on what your design needs, like component Read Article

How to Optimize Your Power Distribution Network in Only Four Steps

How to Optimize Your Power Distribution Network in Only Four Steps Modern designers face a problem that we traditionally did not have to think about: Power Distribution Network () integrity. We have all seen the need for signal integrity for decades, but power integrity has fallen to the wayside for just as long. Traditionally we have had plenty of space to use dedicated power planes that easily supplied our designs with everything they required for operation. But as we continue to push the physical limits of Read Article

How to Address Design Issues Before It’s Too Late

How to Address Design Issues Before It’s Too Late What measures do you take to see past the quality testing of your PCB to ensure you never have to worry about issues post-production? The key lies in analysis automation. Read on to learn more. “ I ran PDN Analyzer^™ on a board currently in fabrication and already caught a mistake I made. I had a footprint peppered with vias and forgot to make them blinds and they were eating up my power plane. is proving to be a very useful tool to identify these Read Article

Altium Designer 2016 Roadshow Recap - Technologies, Predictions, and Passions

Altium Designer 2016 Roadshow Recap - Technologies, Predictions, and Passions From Berlin to the Bay Area and beyond, we journeyed across the globe to share our vision for future of electronics design with our customers at this year’s Altium Designer^® Roadshow Series. What does the future hold for Altium? Read on to find out. From Berlin to the Bay Area and beyond, we journeyed across the globe to share our vision for future of electronics design at this year’s Altium Roadshow Series. This event has always been something Read Article

The Power of Integration - Why Analysis Belongs to PCB Designers

The Power of Integration - Why Analysis Belongs to PCB Designers PCB designers often rely on simulation tools or prototypes for their network data, but this approach can disrupt design flow and drain funds. What if designers were capable of analyzing their network during the board layout process? Read on to find out how designers are increasing productivity with access to analysis data at design time. As the complexity of our product designs increases each year, so do the requirements of our designs. And Read Article

Altium Vault Primer Part 3: Strategizing Your Day-to-Day Library Management Process

Altium Vault Primer Part 3: Strategizing Your Day-to-Day Library Management Process Welcome back to the Altium Vault^® Primer series. In Part 2 we talked about how to unify your design and data management processes by combining both Altium Designer^® and Altium into one unified solution. In Part 3 we’ll be covering how to get started with Altium by strategizing your day-to-day management process with your design team. Welcome back to the Altium Primer series. In Part 2 we talked about how to unify your design and data management Read Article

The Power of PDN Analysis Automation

The Power of PDN Analysis Automation Relying on a prototype for analysis into your network costs time and money. Leveraging automation tools like the PDN Analyzer^™ can reduce costs and allow the engineer to optimize designs without relying on a prototype. Read on for more information. “There’s nothing worse than an engineer dropping a via stitch array late in the RF design process and leaving barely any power plane copper left to carry current on a board makes it painfully obvious Read Article

Reporting Now in On-Demand Licensing

Reporting Now in On-Demand Licensing You’ve been asking for greater visibility and reporting functionality for your Altium On-Demand Licenses, and we’re delivering. Read on to learn about the three new reasons to start using On-Demand Licensing. Three New Reasons to Start Using On-Demand Licensing Fellow engineers, you’ve been asking for greater visibility and reporting functionality for your Altium On-Demand Licenses, and we’re delivering. With the arrival of Altium Designer^®, we Read Article

Altium Vault Primer Part 2: Unifying Your Design and Data Management Processes

Altium Vault Primer Part 2: Unifying Your Design and Data Management Processes Welcome back to the Altium Vault^® Primer series. In Part 1 we talked about the most problems every design team faces without a centralized data management system. If these issues resonated with you, then it’s time to consider getting set up with the Altium. But what is Altium? And how exactly does it help with PCB design? Welcome back to the Altium Primer series. In Part 1 we talked about the most problems every design team faces without a Read Article

Using 3D STEP Models to Reduce Design Respins

Using 3D STEP Models to Reduce PCB Design Respins Integrating mechanical design workflows into electrical design tools has become a necessary component of today’s successful PCB design processes. But transferring inaccurate design data back and forth between the ECAD and MCAD worlds can not only cause frustrations felt by both design teams but can also drastically increase the number of design spins required to fit a PCB into its final assembly. Regardless of the electrical design tool’s 3D Read Article

Supporting Seamless Design Communication with 3D PDFs

Supporting Seamless Design Communication with 3D PDFs With the increasing complexity of modern PCB designs, effectively communicating design intent is a growing challenge that threatens both speed-to-market and overall production costs. In the race to bring quality products to market before your competition, information has to be shared quickly and efficiently while clearly conveying critical aspects of the design. But how can you go about doing that? Leveraging Native 3D^™ PDF Exporting One way of Read Article

Top 6 DFM Problems and DFM issues in PCB Design

The Top 6 DFM Issues in PCBs That Affect Every Design As a PCB Designer, you have to manage a variety of different requirements and expectations. There are electrical, functional, and mechanical aspects to consider. In addition, the PCB layout has to be produced in a timely manner, with the best possible quality, at the lowest possible cost. And through all of these requirements, you also need to factor in DFM (Design for Manufacturability). It’s a big part of the PCB design process and one which Read Article

Hardware Engineers Who Design Tomorrow

Hardware Engineers Who Design Tomorrow Everyone has a personal story about the things that brought them into hardware engineering. Mine stems from a desire to work on designing new technology to make people’s lives better. Designing new technologies can have ripple effects that you could never predict. What is your dream project? Learning to drive is one of the greatest experiences of my life. I grew up a couple miles from the Pacific Ocean in Southern California and remember driving Read Article

Layer Stack Done Right the First Time

Getting Your Layer Stack Done Right the First Time Failure to properly design the layer stack is a common mistake in PCB assembly. This blunder often occurs during the final stages of fabrication, but can easily be prevented by including the appropriate features in the beginning stages of PCB design. Read on to learn about what layer stackup features you’ll want to include in your design. One of the most common mistakes during the PCB fabrication process is improper layer order. If left unchecked Read Article