Project Management

Standardize and Enhance Your Design Efficiency with Project Templates

Standardize and Enhance Your Rapid Design Efficiency with Project Templates Are you unnecessarily repeating steps that are slowing your design workflow down? Starting to feel the pressure of a modern, fast-paced design environment that demands continuous product deliveries and rapid design cycles? Find out how Project Templates can help to speed up your project setup time by standardizing your initial setup goals. Today’s engineers are under constant pressure to finish projects on increasingly shorter product schedules Read Article

How to Easily Reverse Engineer PCB Project Libraries

Reverse Engineering PCB Project Libraries Receiving PCB design files from clients isn’t always as smooth a process. Clients may send incomplete project files, project library files with unstandardized component libraries, or other files that don’t match what you actually need. When that happens, how do you proceed with the project? Outsourcing has become the de-facto solution for companies seeking to cut costs and increase their profit margins. Rather than consuming their own resources Read Article

How to Simplify Your Output Generation Workflow

How to Simplify Your Output Generation Workflow Handing your design off to manufacturing can be a project in itself. Learn how to simplify your output generation workflow in Altium Designer^® to create error-free and accurate PCB documentation for manufacturing. You’ve completed an exhausting PCB design. The project is done, right? Not at all; it simply is an intermediate point before the product enters fabrication and assembly into the final product. Handing the design to manufacturing can be 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

PCB Design Guide for Engineers: Part 2 — Planning

PCB Design Guide for Engineers: Part 2 — Planning PCB Design Guide for Engineers Part 2 - Planning The PCB Design Guide for Engineers is a series that serves as a guide for the novice/student, or electronics engineering professional. It presents a description of the methods, stages, and practices in producing a PCB from an engineer’s vision. From conception to delivery of the fully assembled PCB, this document takes you through basic design stages along with giving you proven industry practices Read Article

Unleash Your Creativity — With Training

Unleash Your Creativity — With Training Learn how to use neck-downs in Altium Designer to simplify your BGA routing process by shrinking and expanding tracks as they enter specific areas on your PCB. When you train decreases your errors range and expand your creative capacity. And this get better when you do the right choice selecting able people to training. Beyond that, the personal satisfaction of creating better, more reliable products is just plain fun! After all, didn’t you Read Article

Confidently Capture All Design Details in the Design Document

Confidently Capture All Design Details in PCB Design Documentation The design document must capture all aspects of the design of a system. This includes the specification, design intent, design process and traceability back to the specification. Only then can the designer be confident that all relevant design information has been captured in one place. This paper is meant to be a guideline to prompt you to consider how to capture design details beyond the fabrication and assembly drawings. INTRODUCTION One of Read Article

Design Data Management Part 2 — The Supply Chain

Design Data Management Part 2 — The Supply Chain Learn how to verify PCB component availability and pricing directly from your design environment in Altium Designer. To learn more about this topic please see the full solution - Ensure Component Availability at Design Time - at Altium.com. Read Article

Creating 3D Component Bodies in a Footprint Library

Creating 3D Component Bodies in a Footprint Library Learn how to transfer accurate ECAD design data between MCAD and ECAD worlds to ensure your PCB design fits into its final assembly with 3D component bodies. To learn more about this topic please see the full solution - Creating Accurate 3D Component Bodies - at Altium.com. Read Article

Storage Manager File Safety Guaranteed

Storage Manager File Safety Guaranteed Learn how the ECAD storage manager in Altium Designer can help you to recover previous versions of a PCB design project and easily access all of your electronics design projects. How many times has this happened to you? You’re working on a project, when all of a sudden, you make some significant modification to it accidentally, and then save it, losing your previous work. In this document, we present a feature called Storage Manager a method that 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

Streamlining the Altium Designer User Experience

Streamlining the Altium Designer User Experience Learn how to streamline your Altium Designer experience with shortcut keys, pcb workflow automation, and a customizable workspace. Modern CAD tools employ an ever growing collection of features and functionality. One of the leaders in this area is Altium Designer, which provides users with a single, unified package that includes Schematic capture, PCB layout, Native 3D PCB, Signal Integrity, SPICE simulation, Embedded Software development, and Read Article

Breaking the Visual Barrier

Breaking the Visual Barrier 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. Fortunately, there’s a better way. Let’s take a look at how you can use Net Color overrides to provide visual enhancements for both the schematic and PCB, to give you visual control over your design Read Article

Simplify Routing With Pin, Part, And Diff-Pair Swapping

Simplify Routing With Pin, Part, And Diff-Pair Swapping When placing parts for a PCB design, the placement often leads to connections that will cross over each other. Although vias to other layers or slightly longer trace routing can be used to address a small number of crossover connections, a large number of crossovers, like those in the figure below, can make routing extremely difficult and time consuming. For more complex routing with larger numbers of crossovers, PCB designers typically employ Read Article

Snippets Part B: Linking Your Schematic and PCB Snippets

Snippets Part B: Linking Your Schematic and PCB Snippets The key to successfully linking circuitry on a single schematic sheet with circuitry in a PCB design, including the components and routing, is in the designation of the components. When creating the two mating snippets in the schematic and the PCB, you need to create unique designators for the components. This paper illustrates the key to success in linking the two schematic and Printed Circuit Board snippets together, and will make reuse of Read Article

Hierarchical Schematic Designs: Organization Is Golden

Hierarchical Schematic Designs: Organization Is Golden Save time and eliminate the headaches associated with multi-sheet design by using hierarchical multi-sheet schematic designs. To learn more about this topic please see the full solution - Hierarchical Schematic Designs: Organization Is Golden - at Altium.com. Read Article