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PCB Design

Not All PCB Design Birds Are Meant to Fly

Not All PCB Design Birds Are Meant to Fly My first job was for a large company, which was surrounded by anxiety and excitement. My main goal was to apply years of learning to justify the fifty-thousand-dollar price tag of my education. I used electronic CAD applications in school, all of which were Windows-based, but my first foray into professional design tools was all Unix. My cube was occupied by a Sun Solaris and HP UX box, both of which generated enough radiation to power a small Read Article

How to Keep Your PCB Design Variants Synchronized

PCB Design Variant Management to Synchronize Designs Product customization is increasingly popular to satisfy customer demand as both time-to-market and the complexity of products continue upward without abatement. By making variations of a baseline product, the new products can address different markets and requirements. But how do you go about keeping synchronized PCB variants? Making the Case for PCB Design Variants You are developing a PCB layout for a smartwatch that comes in three different Read Article

Should You Place Bypass Capacitors Before or After the Circuit

Can You Place Bypass Capacitors Before or After the Circuit In my experience working with teams of engineers on PCB design projects, there inevitably comes a point where the brains in the rooms start disagreeing with each other. In some cases, the answer as to who is in the right is clear. However, as is often the case in technical trades, there are also times when it’s not clear (and the difference is chalked up to “different styles”). A disagreement between electrical engineers that I’ve run across is Read Article

Gaining Insight into Your PCB with Color Displays

Gaining Insight into Your PCB with Color Displays How many PCB design hours have you wasted trying to decipher a legacy project you just inherited? How about wading through thousands of connection lines, trying to determine the best component placement? It can be disheartening, to say the least. What if there was a better way? How Color Override Can Help You Restructure Designs Let’s take a look at how you can use Net Color overrides to provide visual enhancements for both the schematic and PCB Read Article

Syncing Your Schematics and PCB Layouts Increases Efficiency and On-Time Delivery

Synced Up Designs: Syncing Your Schematics and PCB Layouts Increases Efficiency and On-Time Delivery A while back, I was working at a company that designs and installs systems for automating smart irrigation and environmental monitoring. We had gotten into the habit of making last minute “hacks” (pin swapping, gate swapping, etc.) to our boards to accommodate a specific need from a job (or to compensate for a design flaw or oversight on a particular model after getting it back from the manufacturer). While this improvisatory method worked in the Read Article

Optimize Component Power Ratings with Embedded Design Rules

Optimize Component Power Ratings with Embedded Design Rules Ensuring your initial design rules are properly applied the first time is critical to eliminating the need for redesign. By creating conditional limitations and implementing embedded design rules, you can circumvent the potential for error to avoid respins and ensure precise power ratings in your PCB layout. Read on to learn more. I remember my first design that failed during qualification. It was a proven design that had already passed a Read Article

How to Select the Best Tool for PCB Design Collaboration

How to Select the Best Tool for PCB Design Collaboration Today’s products are designed by a team of experts, and without the ability to collaborate time is wasted and errors are introduced. Learn about how to select the best tool to make PCB design collaboration easy. There was a time when once a circuit design was completed, it was handed off to “the PCB designer”, who then produced the board layout. Now, with products as complex as tablets, smartphones and even electronic games, there is no single Read Article

Creating Project Libraries from the Schematic

Creating Project Libraries from the Schematic When you are using an outside manufacturer or sharing a design with another party that does not have access to your internal installed libraries, creating a project makes the data easy to share. No matter how you created your — from already installed libraries, Altium ^® libraries, or even manually using a supplier search, you can localize the files for easier creation. This allows for more portability of your design for external sharing. There Read Article

How to Protect the Integrity of Your Design Files with Storage Manager

How to Protect the Integrity of Your Design Files with Storage Manager There are a number of occurrences that can cause you to lose your work. How can you easily protect the integrity of your pcb design files at design time? Read on to find out. You are in the zone today. You have been working on your design five hours straight and making huge progress. That layer stackup problem you were having…Solved! (Thanks to a great video on how to get the layer stack right.) The via perforated power plane… Conquered! Then you Read Article

The New Age of PCB Documentation

The New Age of PCB Documentation Learn how to eliminate the stress of manual PCB documentation with automated creation of drawings based on the details of your PCB design. To learn more about this topic please see the full solution - How to Eliminate the Manual Documentation Process - at Altium.com. Read Article

Designing For Testability (DFT)

Designing For Testability (DFT) The overall cost to produce a completed printed circuit board PCB can be broken down into several basic categories: The cost of manufacturing the blank PCB, the cost of components, the assembly costs, and the cost of test. That last one, the cost of testing the completed board, can comprise as much as 25% to 30% of the total cost of producing the product. SUMMARY Designing for testability in a PCB design (DFT) is a critical step in the design for Read Article

Enhancing Your Design Efficiency with Project Templates

Enhancing Your Design Efficiency with Project Templates HIERARCHICAL SCHEMATIC DESIGN IN ALTIUM DESIGNER New Altium Designer users may not fully understand the benefits of organizing schematic sheets into a hierarchical top-down or bottom-up perspective. As a result, users often proceed with simple (ﬂat) schematic designs without giving a second thought to project organization. In this paper, we’ll take a comprehensive look at the sheet symbols and how they’re used to synchronize the parts of a larger Read Article

How To Reduce Design Respins With Embedded 3D STEP Models

How To Reduce Design Respins With Embedded 3D STEP Models Read Article

Getting Your Layer Stack Right

Getting Your Layer Stack Right An improper layer stack in your PCB design is one of the most common errors leading to fabrication failures and rejects. Every multilayer circuit board needs a precise PCB stack-up and accurate layout before it can be sent for PCB manufacturing. When you have the right set of circuit board design tools, you can turn your stackup into a real PCB layout and prepare the documentation your fabricator needs. The multi-layer PCB troubleshooting tools Read Article

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2:09 Altium Designer and NASA Watch Video