PCB Design

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

What's the Difference Between Data Rate and Bandwidth? The difference between data rate and bandwidth has been obfuscated for the last 30 years. Here’s how they relate. Read Article

Differential Pairs Without Ground: Is it a Problem? Some designers tell you that differential pairs without ground are acceptable. So who’s correct? We’ll examine the pros and cons of a differential pair ground plane. Read Article

Best Practices in Hardware Version Control Systems Read more about some best practices for using hardware version control systems in electronics design. Read Article

Signal Integrity for Mesh Ground Planes in Flex PCBs Even flex PCBs need a ground plane. Mesh ground planes can provide a 0 V reference in your PCB, but they have particular signal integrity requirements. Read Article

What Goes into PCIe 5.0 Layout and Routing? Here are some PCIe 5.0 layout and routing guidelines for your next high speed add-in card and motherboard to support PCIe 5.0 devices. Read Article

Modeling PCB Interconnects as Causal Systems Real PCB interconnects are causal systems and must be modeled with the correct time-dependent behavior. Read Article

IoT PCB Design: It's More Than Just Hardware Development IoT products are lovely and sometimes frustrating products. Design teams need to be multifunctional to design these products successfully. They need to get the hardware, embedded software, web platform and/or app, and mechanical enclosure perfect if they want to see market success. Problems in any of these areas mean your new product will be substandard and, eventually, competitive products will win market share. So what does it take to ensure Read Article

The History and Use of Cross-Hatched Planes Read to learn all about hatch ground in your PCB instead of using ground planes. You'll learn about how this type of ground region impacts signal integrity. Read Article

The Benefits of High-Dk PCB Materials The terms “high-speed design” and “low-Dk PCB laminate” are often used in the same articles, and often in the same sentence. Low-Dk PCB materials have their place in high speed and high-frequency PCBs, but high-Dk PCB materials provide power integrity. Low-Dk PCBs are typically chosen as they tend to have lower loss tangent. Thus high-DK PCB materials tend to get overlooked for high speed and high-frequency PCBs. When we look at power integrity Read Article

The Increasingly Important Role Of Dielectric Loss Tangent In PCB Laminates Learn more about dielectric loss tangent, the role it plays in high-speed designs, and how it varies as a result of the glass to resin ratio and frequency. Read Article

Solder Bridge Jumper Best Practices in PCB Design A PCB variant is often simply thought of as a new layout created from an old design. However, if you’re creative with your routing and layout, you can use a solder bridge jumper to configure portions of a single PCB layout for multiple variants. This lets you quickly create variants of a PCB layout without rerouting traces or changing your schematics. If you plan to use jumpers in your PCB layout, there are some important guidelines to follow to Read Article

Robert Feranec and IoT Security The AltiumLive Virtual Summit is just around the corner! So in a unique episode of OnTrack, we share clips of Robert Feranec, motherboard designer and founder and CEO of Fedevel Academy, speaking on such topics as IoT device security in an increasingly connected world, the pitfalls of underestimating the complexity of your fellow stakeholder’s job, and the value of attending AltiumLive. This is a short and impactful episode you shouldn’t miss. Read Article

Getting Through Agile Prototyping in Agile Hardware Development If you’ve worked in software development, such as in web design or enterprise software design, you know how difficult it can be to get clients to understand the look and feel of a product from a static wireframe. We’ve had the same problem in recent projects, especially when the POC was not a technical person. The client ultimately had to take it on faith that we knew what we were doing and could deliver what we promised. There’s no substitute Read Article

Using Cellular for Internet of Things Devices and Design Cellular internet of things products are widely accessible and easy to design thanks to standard cellular modem modules and transceiver components. Read Article

Tips for Managing the Hardware Development Cycle Your PCB design team needs to stay productive. Here’s how you can control the hardware development cycle when working remotely. Read Article

Determining the Parasitic Inductance of a DC to DC Converter Unwanted parasitic inductance from capacitors and transformer leakage inductance in DC/DC converters cause power instability in digital systems. Here's how you can determine parasitic inductance in your power system. Read Article

Making Value Chain Management Work for Electronics Exploring and tracking projects as part of value chain management is possible with the right set of managed design data tools in the cloud. Read Article