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Altium Designer 20

The most powerful, modern and easy-to-use PCB design tool for professional use

Altium Designer 20

The most powerful, modern and easy-to-use PCB design tool for professional use

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PCB Design

Read the latest information PCB Design from the industry's leading experts.

Mitigating High Junction Temperature to Optimize PCB Performance I consider myself a great multitasker, especially when it comes to preparing meals for my son. I’ll have fish frying in one pan, soup boiling in the other, and potatoes in the oven. Things usually go as well as planned except on rare occasions when one of the dishes burns while I’m absorbed in other tasks. Fortunately, these temperature problems won’t cost me much more than a few dollars and some time. In electronics, your hardware can literally Read Article

Mechanical System Verification Keeps Production Optimized These days, electronic packaging is more than just a neat rectangular box with some holes drilled for input and output cables. Electronics are sleeker with uniquely-shaped packaging, and your PCB needs to fit into tight clearances. Whether it is through design optimization with collaboration between design engineers and mechanical engineering, or through a production process with strong inventory management and verification software, you may have Read Article

High-Speed Design: Definitive Guide for Utilizing Altium Designer for Your Board Needs There was a time in printed circuit board layout when working with high-speed designs was a living nightmare. Those older CAD tools just didn’t have the horse-power or the functionality to help much when it came to working with the extra design requirements. Differential pairs had to be routed together manually, and measured trace lengths had to be calculated by hand. And if that wasn’t hard enough, trying to determine the total length of a Read Article

PCB Routing Tips: Navigating Your Way Through BGA Fanout Options Tom rose through the ranks of his company to become the new vice-president. He had worked hard, forged relationships, and consistently built his knowledge about the company. Unfortunately, Tom also contracted a serious disease called acronymitis that spread like the plague throughout key sectors of the company. Try as he might, Tom could not resist speaking in acronyms. Sometimes, his wife would hear him talking in his sleep—in acronyms Read Article

Copper Choice and Copper Efficiency for High-Frequency PCB Design Expert woodworkers spend immeasurable amounts of time making sure that finished wood has an exceptionally smooth surface before staining and varnishing can occur. Although my dreams to become the popular host of a DIY woodworking show have diminished to simply attempting to produce a high-quality solid wood bookcase for my wife, I have retained my obsession with achieving a smooth surface. Sanding rough wood is a chore, to say the least. Whether Read Article

Creating Library Parts and Attaching 3D Models Enables Clearer Designs Between custom and standard components, your component helps you keep track of everything from SPICE models to basic 2D footprints for use during layout. As PCB design leaves the two dimensions and enters three dimensions, modern component libraries now come packaged with 3D models. Building a 3D model for your proprietary components is also a good idea if you ever plan to check mechanical clearances. But most PCB design software platforms don’t Read Article

Helpful Tips for Interactive Routing in Altium Designer I haven’t met a PCB designer yet who doesn’t like to manually route tracks on their design. It can be therapeutic, cathartic, relaxing, and (if you aren’t under a lot of pressure to complete your design), downright fun. On the flip side though is the frustration that you can feel when you can’t get the PCB design tools to work the way you know that they should. You’re trying to route some tracks in and you need to change a trace width, but you Read Article

Are Engineers and PCB Technologists Homegrown? Mihir and Milan Shah Over the past year, I’ve noticed a subtle trend in the designers and technologists we’ve interviewed for this newsletter. Have you noticed it? There have been a number of times people cited their parents as the ones who inspired them to pursue an electronics career. (Think...Rick Hartley, Nicole Creeden, Bill Brooks, Charles Pfeil, Mary Elizabeth McCulloch, etc.). This is especially true at Royal Circuit Solutions, which is Read Article

How to Optimize HDI Design in Electronics Neutron stars seem like the stuff of science fiction. Imagine stars as large as the sun exploding in a blinding supernova. Better yet, consider how the spectacular explosion peels the outer layers of the star away and leaves a small, continually collapsing dense core. Gravity pushes the dense matter together to the point of protons and electrons combining into neutrons. As the star’s gravity becomes 200 billion times stronger than the Earth’s Read Article

Termination Methods in High Speed and High Frequency PCBs To this day I still have a tall stack of printed articles I refer to when working on a new research or design project. Even though I know I can find all of this information online, I still refer to my trusty stack of articles regularly for design information. Keeping all the relevant system design rules and research results in one place saves me a huge amount of time. Whether you’re working with PCBs or any other electronic system, keeping track Read Article

Board Shape Management in 3D Modeling Software Rectangular PCBs are old school. Newer devices are more likely to use an odd-shaped PCB that closely conforms to its packaging, or a rigid-flex board that moves with the device. 3D visualization tools have become essential for PCB designers, especially when designing rigid-flex boards with unique shapes. Using CAD software, you’ll want to have a sketchup that ensures printing is easy to achieve. Managing board shapes for use in rigid and rigid Read Article

An Introduction to Multi-board Design in Altium Designer I have heard that brain games are a good way to stay sharp, not to mention ward off some of the nastier mental incapacities. One of my favorite ways to implement this advice is by doing puzzles. Although, I love the crossword puzzles where you complete the words from a given clue, I think puzzles that require you to put the pieces together can be the most challenging, especially when it is a group activity. It reminds me of one the more daunting Read Article

Communicating PCB Layer Stackup Needs to Manufacturers False or inadequate communication can wreck a project. Just recently, I overheard a husband and wife talking about buying blinds. Seems like a simple topic and a simple task. It probably is, if everyone listens, pays attention, and understands. While she was thinking about decorating her daughter’s bedroom, he was thinking about… hunting. Imagine his excitement as he purchased the limited edition Beak n’ Feather hay bale duck blind and how he Read Article

Ceramic vs. FR4 Multilayer PCBs: When to Use Either and How For most folks, hearing the word “ceramics” conjures images of a middle school or high school art class, where you proudly created a deformed coffee cup for your parents. Fast forward to your days as an engineer, and ceramics material play a critical role in electronic components. A ceramic material PCB design with capacitors can be a valuable circuit to know. Industries that require high speed/high frequency boards that can withstand harsh Read Article

Multi-Directional Communication for Easy Mechanical and Electrical Collaboration My neighbor and I were sitting on the patio one summer dreaming up a Christmas display that would span both our yards. Engineers, right? Ambitious project, for sure, but we had fun visualizing Santa and his reindeer flying across our two roofs. We’d use LED light strings to span the rooflines and we’d incorporate controllers to synchronize Christmas music. Several months later after summer had turned to Fall, in comes the neighbor with a CAD Read Article

Overview of PCB Development Process I have a friend who forgets that the rest of us can’t read his mind. He often starts a conversation without any sort of introduction or context. There have been many times where after several minutes of dialog I have had to hold up my hands and simply ask; “what are you talking about?” Once he backs up and gives me an overview, then I am ready for the details. Although this had made for some amusing moments, it isn’t nearly so funny when it Read Article

PCB Trace Corrosion: Why It Happens and How to Prevent It When most people drop their cell phone in water, they hurriedly dry off the outside of the phone, remove the battery, and toss the phone in a bag of rice. The myth goes that the rice draws water out from the inside of the phone, thus saving your phone’s the precious electronic circuitry, your wallet’s money, and your own sanity. What people don’t realize is that simply drying out your phone is not a solution. Water ingress can cause the device to Read Article