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Schematic Capture and Schematic Entry

How to Simplify and Automate Your PCB ECO Workflow

Automating PCB Design Environments: How to Simplify and Automate Your PCB ECO Workflow Shuffling different programs for your schematic and PCB layout design changes costs both time and money. Altium Designer^® tackles this issue with a unified design system that automatically transfers data between schematic and PCB using component links. Read on to learn how component links are increasing productivity by automating ECO procedures. Transferring data from schematic to PCB, or vice versa, is traditionally a task stretched across Read Article

The Peak of Engineering Efficiency is Now Available in Altium Designer 17

The Peak of Engineering Efficiency is Now Available in Altium Designer 17 The Peak of Engineering Efficiency and PCB Design Technology is Now Available in Altium 17 The engineering mentality is one focused on efficiency and creativity. And whether you’re designing electronics in today’s autonomous vehicles or connected devices, the careful balance between art and science walks a very thin line. Sooner or later, you’re bound to hit a roadblock. Not in your ideas, but in executing those ideas efficiently in your tools Read Article

Using Hierarchical Schematic Design to Stay Organized and Synchronized

Using ORCAD Hierarchical Schematic Design to Stay Organized and Synchronized New Altium Designer^® users may not fully understand the benefits of organizing schematic sheets into a hierarchical top-down or bottom-up perspective. Read on to learn how to keep your hierarchical design project organized and synchronized with circuit schematic hierarchies. New Altium users may not fully understand the benefits of organizing schematic sheets into a hierarchical top-down or bottom-up perspective designs. As a result, users often Read Article

Isolate Objects on a Design with Custom PCB Queries

Isolate Objects on a Design with Custom PCB Queries It can be a great challenge for engineers to make edits to specific objects on overpopulated boards. Leverage the global editing and custom query features in Altium Designer^® to easily locate objects and maintain consistency in your designs. Read on to learn more. Every faces significant challenges once a board gets overpopulated with and traces. One of the greatest tasks of working with complex electronic designs is managing a large number of Read Article

The PCB Design Guide for Engineers Part 2 - PCB Planning

The PCB Design Guide for Engineers Part 2 - PCB Planning As a PCB designer, the planning of the development of a one or several printed circuit boards can be a daunting task. There will be a host of other software tools that will be used in the development of your project. From tools that can be used to track the progress of your human resources within your team to the software tools used by your internal and external resources to bring your project to life. What about high speed components, the solder Read Article

Experience a Completely Unified Design Environment

Experience a Completely Unified Design Environment With today’s ever growing market expectations, strict project deadlines, and increasingly complex designs, what solutions exist to minimize the time spent switching between your design tools to complete projects? Now you can successfully deliver products on time and within budget in a completely unified design environment. Read on to find out how. Do you feel like your schematic and pcb tools are from different planets? Are you still using a Read Article

How to Keep Your PCB Design Variants Synchronized

PCB Design Variant Management to Synchronize Designs Product customization is increasingly popular to satisfy customer demand as both time-to-market and the complexity of products continue upward without abatement. By making variations of a baseline product, the new products can address different markets and requirements. But how do you go about keeping synchronized PCB variants? Making the Case for PCB Design Variants You are developing a PCB layout for a smartwatch that comes in three different Read Article

Syncing Your Schematics and PCB Layouts Increases Efficiency and On-Time Delivery

Synced Up Designs: Syncing Your Schematics and PCB Layouts Increases Efficiency and On-Time Delivery A while back, I was working at a company that designs and installs systems for automating smart irrigation and environmental monitoring. We had gotten into the habit of making last minute “hacks” (pin swapping, gate swapping, etc.) to our boards to accommodate a specific need from a job (or to compensate for a design flaw or oversight on a particular model after getting it back from the manufacturer). While this improvisatory method worked in the 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

PCB Design Guide for Engineers: Part 1 The Team

PCB Design Guide for Engineers: Part 1 The Team Who is involved in the PCB design and engineering process? Creating a PCB layout is a team effort, not just one person’s responsibility. Multiple engineering and scientific disciplines come together to make your vision a reality. As the project engineer, your first step is identifying and assembling your PCB design team, ensuring all key roles are covered for a successful project. PCB Design Guide for Engineers Part 1: The Team This PCB Design 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

Quickly Create Project Libraries from the Schematic

Quickly Create Project Libraries from the Schematic Learn how to quickly create project libraries from the schematic for easy external sharing using the Parameter Manager in Altium Designer. 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 library makes the data easy to share. No matter how you created your library — from already installed libraries, Altium Vault libraries, or even Read Article

Quickly Identify and Correct Mistakes with Electronic Rule Checking

Quickly Identify and Correct Mistakes with Electronic Rule Checking A product lifecycle management (PLM) tool allows users to access all data related to corporate products. This includes all component and design data, but also other critical data such as cost, preferred suppliers and other relevant corporate data. They integrate data, processes, business systems, and ultimately people, oﬀering unrivaled transparency into extended enterprise. PLM systems allow companies to manage information throughout the entire 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

Implementing Touch Sensors

Implementing Touch Sensors Learn how to design a reliable alternative to traditional mechanical switches with capacitive touch sensor technology in Altium Designer. Capacitive touch sensor technology offers an inexpensive and highly reliable alternative to the traditional mechanical switches that are used in electronics control interfaces. Manually creating or resizing a touch sensor’s complex vendor/technology- specific patterns can be both difficult and time-consuming 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

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