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PCB Routing

Differential pairs

Confused About Differential Signaling or Clocks? Check out this quick snippet of the Altium Podcast with guru of high speed design Lee Ritchey The primary reason that differential signaling is dominating the digital world is that far higher data bandwidths can be achieved over a pair of wires than with parallel, single-ended signaling protocols. The Internet as we know it would not be possible without differential signaling. This information is intended to clear up any confusion about Read Article

Asymmetric Striplines in Your Next Multi-layer PCB

Asymmetric Striplines in Your Next Multi-layer PCB The beauty of symmetricity in art, science, and nature, in general, is something of a wonder. The visual balance between elements in a painting or drawing can make or break a piece of artwork. PCB design is as much art as it is engineering, and symmetricity plays as much of a technical role as it does an aesthetic role. Ever since its humble beginnings as a replacement for high frequency coaxial cables and waveguides, striplines are a mainstay Read Article

Routing Differential Pairs in Altium Designer

Routing Differential Pairs in a PCB Layout with Altium Designer Altium Designer makes routing differential pairs in a PCB layout and managing differential impedance between components quick and easy. Read Article

Split PCB Plane Pours are Partial to Carefully Managed Connections

Split PCB Plane Pours are Partial to Carefully Managed Connections James Madison said that “philosophy is common sense with big words.” Big words can produce a mess if applied with the wrong syntax. Similarly, the ability to produce intricate PCB designs requires extraordinary vision, each minute step exquisitely accomplished through common sense. Common sense and, if you’re lucky, elegant design tools. PCB design tools able to make common sense from complicated layout rules promote efficient development Read Article

50:25 Altium Designer 19 Key Features We are pleased to announce the release of Altium Designer 19.0! An exciting new era of Altium Designer is here Watch Video

Layout Guidelines for Embedded Power Supplies

Layout Guidelines for Embedded Power Supplies I don’t get out to raucous parties as much as did in my 20’s. The thought of yelling over other people just to have a conversation is about as enticing as getting a tooth pulled. Crosstalk doesn’t just kill the mood at a party, it can ruin the functionality of electronic systems. Most PCB designers worry more about crosstalk between signals traces, but your power supply and power components can have an even greater impact. Thankfully, some simple Read Article

When Should You Use an Online Circuit Calculator?

When Should You Use an Online Circuit Calculator? Even if you’re an experienced engineer, you probably haven’t perfectly memorized every single formula you need to design PCBs and electronic devices. If this is true for experienced engineers, then what is a weekend warrior to do? Thankfully, there are many online calculators available that can help even novice designers build devices that meet industry standards. As you venture down the rabbit hole of designing a new electronic product, it Read Article

Fly-by topology for DDR3 vs DDR4 RAM

Fly-by Topology for DDR3 and DDR4 Memory: Routing Guidelines Banner image credit: Nine Dot Connects Take a look at your RAM chips the next time you're upgrading your desktop or laptop. If you need to, get the chip under a magnifying glass. Any traces you might see on the surface layer are just the beginning of a complicated web of traces between the edge connector and the RAM chips. Although the routing can get quite complicated, you can see a relatively simple topology when you take a 30,000 foot view of Read Article

Low Power Electronics: Do You Need a Battery to Keep Your Circuit Boards Online?

Low Power Electronics: Do You Need a Battery to Keep Your Circuit Boards Online? I was recently chatting with a friend of mine about his new hardware startup and how his progress on his new product was coming along. He was building a Bluetooth device and his first run at a prototype only kept his circuit board online for 40 minutes before draining the battery. I’ve noticed the difficulty of many IoT devices is that often they need to run for long periods of time. Whether it’s something you can wear or a sensor in a smart home Read Article

43:28 Altium Designer 19 Sneak Peek Watch Video

Tips to Minimize the Effects of Differential Noise in RS485 Communication

How to Reduce Differential Noise in RS485 Communication I’ve never been a morning person and pride myself on simply getting dressed and making it to work on time. Although I typically beat the traffic and appear at the office just in time, there have been occasions when I’ve arrived wearing mismatched socks. In these situations, I walk straight to my desk and hope that my embarrassment stays unnoticed. In electronics, you might deal with a completely different type of embarrassment if you fail to keep Read Article

How to Expand Input and Output for a Microcontroller

How to Expand Input and Output for a Microcontrollers Circuit Board When working through practice boards and schematics very early on in my education, I remember more than once thinking about simply increasing the board size so that I could fit my components properly and make routing easier. It definitely would not have helped, and I’m glad I persevered in finding solutions through the challenges, but there are still times in my career where I’ve looked at the necessities of devices and wished I could just make Read Article

Utilizing Creative Routing Solutions with Tight Component Placement

PCB Creativity and Training: Utilizing Creative Routing Solutions with Tight Component Placement When I was working in a research lab and designing PCBs for our homemade optical systems, my layouts were down and dirty. We didn’t worry about little things like packaging, limited board space, or compact routing. We were happy as long as we could get all of the required components to appear on the board and eventually the board became a printed circuit. Once our microscope systems became more intricate, connecting our high speed, custom images Read Article

When to Prefer a Longer Trace Over an Additional Via

When to Prefer Longer PCB Traces Over Additional Vias Whenever I go to buy a new big-ticket appliance, I always weigh my options. Sometimes I let this paralyze me, and I end up making a spending decision that I later regret. But it doesn’t have to be this way when deciding how to route signals in your next PCB. When you have many components and interconnects to place on your PCB, you need to weigh your options. Dense routing is as much an art as it is science, and having as much information as Read Article

PCB Impedance Calculation and Cross Section Features in PCB Layout

PCB Impedance Calculation and Cross Section Features in PCB Layout When I first started laying out printed circuit boards, there wasn’t a lot of concern about controlled impedance routing. At that time, most everything was low speed and we were using larger traces and thru-hole vias for the simple four layer boards. That all changes once a board grows in speed, and changes demanded that we become more involved with the layer stackup design and specifying trace widths. At first we relied on board constraint Read Article

Choosing Replacement Components With an Integrated Library

Find Replacement Electronic Components With an Integrated Library Much as we would like, designing a new product or system is not without its hiccups. Designs, functionality, and component changes may be made at the last minute, forcing design modification or component replacement. Replacement circuit components or replacement can require thorough knowledge of your circuit boards. Repairing a circuit board is often more than finding a circuit breaking. Electrical equipment and service panel tinkering can go so Read Article

HDI PCB Designs and the CAD Tools Behind Them

HDI PCB Designs and the CAD Tools Behind Them Although it is said that the only guarantees in life are death and taxes, I would submit that the third guarantee in life is that electronic devices will continue to get smaller and smaller. I’m pretty sure that no one wants their cell phone to grow back to the size of a brick again, so to continue this path of ever decreasing sized electronics means that circuit boards need to shrink in size as well. The best way to do this is to use high Read Article