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PCB Design

Use Rules-Driven To Meet Your Component Placement Guidelines

Use Rules-Driven Design To Meet Your Component Placement Guidelines Modern PCBs require keeping track of a ton of design rules, and even more components. No one has time to keep track of every design rule under the sun. Other software companies make it difficult to force your design rules to apply to all of your tools, including your layout tool. Instead, unified design software can help you stick to your design rules and improve your productivity, ensuring that your finished PCB has the functionality you require Read Article

The Best Results Come from PCB Design Services Using Altium Designer

The Best Results Come from PCB Layout Services Using Altium Designer The power of Altium Designer combined with the professional services and resources recommended by Altium will give you your best design results. ALTIUM DESIGNER Software for PCB design services to make circuits come easy. You have an important design project ahead of you, but what you don’t have is the resources to get it done on time. Not only do you need help, but you also need a powerful PCB design system to get the job done as quickly and Read Article

Double Sided PCB Design in Altium Designer

Double Sided PCB Design in Altium Designer Most newer Printed Circuit Boards are complex multilayer beasts that require unique design methods and difficult routing strategies. However, many pieces of hardware that form the cornerstone of modern electronic devices are still designed on two-layer boards. These boards still require a number of critical design tools that most platforms place in separate programs. If you’re looking for a design platform that makes double-sided PCB design easy Read Article

Arduino Shields Are Ready-Made Addons for Circuit Development

Arduino Shields Are Ready-Made Addons for Circuit Development Arduino Shield projects are integrated circuit blocks available in off-the-shelf printed circuit board assemblies. ALTIUM DESIGNER The most powerful, modern, and easy-to-use PCB design tool for professional use. Arduino is a company that offers off-the-shelf printed circuit board assemblies containing small circuits for idea development. Each Arduino is designed with connections to interface with other circuit assemblies for the developer Read Article

Antenna Impedance Matching in Altium Designer

Antenna Impedance Matching Calculator with Altium Designer Impedance matching plays a critical role in high speed, high frequency, and wireless PCBs. Building a PCB with strong wireless communication capabilities requires impedance matching your antenna to its receiver/transceiver using one of many termination schemes, especially if you opt to print your own antenna on your PCB. When you use design software with the best signal simulation and analysis tools, you can easily identify the best termination Read Article

PCB Stacking Techniques: Determine PCB Layers and Design an Elegant Layer Stack that Maximizes Signal Integrity Intelligent placement of PCB layers nullifies RF energy and results in PCAs that pass EMC on their first pass. Read on to learn about the best PCB stacking techniques. ALTIUM DESIGNER Professional PCB design tool with proficient PCB signal layer and stack-up management. Use inner layers with adjacent ground planes for clocks When considering how to determine PCB layers stack-up, the best practice is to prioritize signal integrity. Signal Read Article

Designing to Meet Thermal Demands with Altium Designer

Designers Meet Thermals Demands with Altium Designer Thermal demands from high power or high-speed components can have a major effect on the functionality of your PCB. Your design software has a major role to play in helping you create durable designs that can withstand and mitigate problems from heat generated in your PCB. When your design software contains simulation and verification features in a single interface, you can quickly identify hotspots and add elements like thermal pads to dissipate Read Article

DIY PCB Stencil Made Easy with Proper Board Layout Software

DIY PCB Stencil Made Easy with Proper Board Layout Software Fabrication, assembly, and manufacturing can all become a breeze so long as you’re using the proper PCB design software. Make sure that anything you use in those processes, like what is a stencil for PCB, is accounted for with your CAD tools. In this article, we are going to explore what is stencil in PCB and the types of stencil for PCB. ALTIUM DESIGNER PCB design software is responsible for enabling your designs to be produced with ease. The Read Article

Advanced Routing and Verification of Ground and Power Supply PCB Layout Traces with Altium Designer

Advanced Power Route Creation and Verification of Ground and Power Supply PCB Layout Traces with Altium Designer Probably, the most formidable task of circuit board design is routing traces. In addition to connecting components accurately you must also route through vias for multi-layer PCB design while ensuring that spacing and clearance specifications meet the tolerances of your PCB fabrication and assembly services. And successfully meeting these challenges requires that you incorporate good grounding and power supply PCB layout into your design. ALTIUM Read Article

Precision PCB Design Software with a Differential Line Impedance Calculator

Precision PCB Design Software with a Differential Line Impedance Calculator Altium Designer’s differential line impedance calculator will set up your impedance-controlled differential pair routing widths for you. ALTIUM DESIGNER For better impedance control, use PCB design software you can trust. One thing is for sure: When you are routing a high-speed PCB design you are going to be working with impedance-controlled routing and differential pairs. There have been trace routing tools available for a long time that help Read Article

What is Burn-in Testing for Electronics?

What is Burn-in Testing for Electronics? Once you’re planning for production of any new board, you’ll likely be planning a battery of tests for your new product. These tests often focus on functionality and, for high speed/high frequency boards, signal/power integrity. However, you may intend for your product to operate for an extreme period of time, and you’ll need some data to reliably place a lower limit on your product’s lifetime. In addition to in-circuit tests, functional tests Read Article

Bluetooth 5.1 SoC vs. Module: Which is Best for Your Design?

Bluetooth 5.1 SoC vs. Module: Which is Best for Your Design? The list of features available in Bluetooth just got a little longer since the release of Bluetooth 5.1. Component manufacturers have taken this mobile technology to the next level for IoT devices by integrating wireless comms with an MCU for embedded processing. This is just another step in the continuous push to pack more functionality into a smaller footprint. If you want to incorporate a Bluetooth 5.1 SoC into your new product, you have two Read Article

How Copper Foil Roughness Affects Your Signals and Impedance

How Copper Foil Roughness Affects Your Signals and Impedance The history of engineering, both electrical and mechanical, is littered with approximations that have fallen by the wayside. These approximations worked well for a time and helped advance technology significantly over the decades. However, any model has limits on its applicability, and the typical RLCG transmission line model and frequency-independent impedance equations are no different. So what’s the problem with these equations? Senior PCB Read Article

PCB Mountable Connectors: SMD vs. Through-hole

PCB Mountable Connectors: SMD vs. Through-hole When I designed some of my first boards, I was always working at DC or low speed, and any signal integrity problems from my connectors were an afterthought. These initial boards were for low frequency measurements of an electrochemical sensor. The only circuitry involved was a low-pass filter circuit with through-hole passives, a PCB mountable connector for a lab-grade power supply, and a parallel connection to an SMU. After learning the finer Read Article

Designing Pressure Tolerant Electronics: It's All About Mechanics

Designing Pressure Tolerant Electronics: It's All About Mechanics After a recent inquiry from a customer about a high power board that must withstand high gas pressures, my team suddenly realized we needed to do some research on designing pressure tolerant electronics. This area is not as popular as designing electronics for ambient pressures, but the design techniques used here enable important scientific expeditions and industrial applications in high pressure environments. Whether the board will be placed in Read Article

High Voltage SMPS PCB Layout to Minimize Heat and Noise

High Voltage SMPS PCB Layout to Minimize Heat and Noise Whether you are performing AC-DC conversion or DC-DC conversion, switching power supply layouts are common in high voltage design and must be constructed carefully. Although this system is quite common, it will easily radiate EMI due to the fast changes in voltage and current during switching. Designers can rarely adapt existing designs into new systems as a minor change in one area can create an EMI problem that is difficult to diagnose. With Read Article

How to Select an Inductor for a Buck Converter

How to Select an Inductor for a Buck Converter An SMPS is one of those quiet (yet electrically noisy) devices that makes your favorite electronics run smoothly. They sit in the background quietly doing their duty, yet your board wouldn’t operate without them. As part of DC-DC converter design for power-hungry applications, component selection is quite important for ensuring stable power delivery to a load with high efficiency. Among the numerous DC-DC converter topologies, a buck converter Read Article