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Schematic Capture and Schematic Entry

Underwater ROV Design and Component Selection

Underwater ROV Design and Component Selection Underwater ROVs need to obey the same reliability standards as other high-performance, high uptime products like aerospace and military systems. High reliability is all about component selection and designing boards that are fully manufacturable while keeping a system safe. The DFM features, supply chain tools, and design verification engine in Altium Designer give underwater ROV builders a complete package for electronics design and fabrication Read Article

How to Prepare Your Project for PCB Cart Manufacturing with Altium Designer

How to Prepare Your Project for PCB Cart Manufacturing with Altium Designer The electronics industry is massive and there are plenty of PCB manufacturers to choose from for your next order. When you need to prepare your next board for fabrication and assembly, how can you quickly generate deliverables for manufacturers like PCB Cart? Instead of generating all manufacturing documentation manually, designers need an easy way to create deliverables for fabrication and assembly. If you plan to work with PCB Cart to produce Read Article

Stay Productive When You Switch to Altium Designer

Upgrade from AutoCAD PCB Design Software to Altium Designer's Unified Environment Most designers are familiar with AutoCAD electrical PCB design software for mechanical or construction drafting, and for making important engineering diagrams. AutoCAD PCB design is great for many tasks involved in electrical or mechanical engineering, but PCB designers need more than mechanical drafting tools to make advanced electronics. To get your designs to the next level, you need the best set of ECAD tools on the market, rather than using Read Article

Design Your Small Circuit Board in Altium Designer

Design Your Small Circuit Board in Altium Designer Large circuit boards, small circuit boards, and anything in between might seem like they need separate sets of PCB layout features. In reality, your PCB design software shouldn’t delineate your PCB design based on size. Whether you need to design a large or small circuit board, a design application with high-quality CAD tools will help you get the job done quickly and prepare your board for production. Small circuit board designs are much easier Read Article

Working Through Circuit Simulation Free Often Won’t Work, Try Altium Designer

Working Through Circuit Simulation for Free Often Won’t Work, Try Altium Designer Electronic Design Automation (EDA) software provides the tools that support the design and analysis of electronic devices, systems, and printed circuit boards. Within this broad definition of EDA software, some companies offer free PCB design programs while others focus on schematic capture, mixed-signal simulation, Very Large-Scale Integration (VLSI) circuit design, and customizable design rule checking. While many EDA software applications Read Article

photodiode circuit

Photodiode Circuit Simulation and Design for Your PCB Your design tools should give you an easy way to create circuit diagrams, simulate electrical behavior, and start a new PCB layout. A photodiode circuit is important in many applications, ranging from simple ON/OFF light detection to receiving digital data in an optical fiber. These semiconductor devices are similar to a regular diode, but they can be difficult to simulate without the right component models and circuit design tools. With Altium Read Article

Altium’s Parameter Table Editor Lets You Control Your Project Settings

Altium’s Parameter Table Editor Lets You Control Your Project Settings There’s a lot of data that goes into any PCB design project. The design files and project files all have their own parameters, and these can be customized to provide plenty of useful information for data management. ECAD software users need a simple way to keep their parameter sets organized within their project files, component libraries, and much more. Parameters can appear in all types of objects in your ECAD software, as well as in any type Read Article

Altium Designer Beats Any OEMSTrade Electronics Part Search

Altium Designer Beats Any OEMSTrade Electronics Part Search Finding and sourcing new components for your design should be an easy process. Parts specifications can get very detailed, and there are many component options and part browsers on the market (e.g. Ultra Librarian, SamacSys, DMS, etc.). How can designers narrow down to the components they need and source components from authorized distributors? Using an OEMSTrade electronics part search and other distributor websites only gives you a partial view Read Article

Build a Comprehensive Electronic Symbols Library in Altium Designer

Build an Electronic PCB Schematic Symbols Library in Altium Designer Electronic symbols are the basis for the CAD documents you’ll create before you prepare a circuit board layout. An electronic symbols library contains basic symbols and figures that are used in electrical drawings, and they need to be linked to the PCB footprints that will appear in your PCB layout. When you need to prepare and organize clear PCB layouts and electrical drawings, you need a reliable source of CAD symbols and PCB footprints, and it Read Article

Design and Simulate Any Low Pass Filter Circuit for Your PCB

Low Pass Filter Simulation for Your PCB Design Many engineers will do some basic calculations by hand in order to understand their filter and amplifier circuits. However, for complex circuits that do not obey standard series and parallel rules, or that use nonlinear components like diodes and transistors, more sophisticated methods are needed. As such, designers need an easy-to-use but powerful simulation application to aid filter design and simulation. Some programs make simulations Read Article

Huge Vu-meter with RGB LEDs Project

Huge VU-meter with RGB LEDs Project A laboratory journal to guide you through the steps to develop a successful product that value-conscious customers are sure to love. Read Article

Using the iPad Pro for Electronic Design

Using the iPad Pro for PCB Electronic Design Altium 365 was updated with a smoother, more feature-full and more intuitive interface for the web design viewer. I want to use this occasion to share with you some of my favourite apps and websites for electronic design. Read Article

Save Money and Keep PCB Costs Down with Consistent Documentation Tools

Save Money and Keep PCB Pricing Down with Consistent Documentation Tools Calculating PCB costs requires professional PCB drawing tools with mechanical and electrical standards incorporated intelligently for aggressive pricing. But how to reduce PCB cost? ALTIUM DESIGNER PCB design tools are capable of tracking costs and keeping production expenditures within the budget. Produce low-cost instructions with elegant drill files Calculating printed circuit board fabrication and assembly costs requires knowledge of the Read Article

Include IC Pin Numbers in Your Altium Designer Parts Data

Include IC Pin Numbers in Your Altium Designer Parts Data When you create components, you’ll really be creating 3 different CAD models: a schematic symbol, PCB footprint, and 3D model. Integrated circuits need multiple pieces of information, including courtyards, IC pin numbers, designators, and electrical simulation models to be most effective in your PCB design and analysis tools. If you’re working with most CAD tools, you won’t have the features you need to perform all of these tasks. Enter Altium Read Article

Quickly Replicate Circuits with a Connection Room in Your PCB Layout

Quickly Replicate Circuits with a Connection Room in Your PCB Layout Modern PCB designs can get very complex, and designers need tools to help them stay organized. Schematic sheets are a great start, but simply organizing different circuit blocks into different schematics is not enough to ensure your designs are organized. Altium Designer unifies your schematic design and PCB layout tasks into a single program, and it includes a PCB connection rooms feature to keep your circuit blocks synchronized. Here’s how you Read Article

PCB Coplanar Waveguide Calculator

PCB Coplanar Waveguide Calculator RF PCBs can be complex boards that need careful interconnect design and layout. If you’re designing an RF PCB for microwave or higher frequencies, controlled impedance routing should be top of mind to ensure signal integrity. You can choose from many routing styles, but whichever routing style you choose, it should provide isolation against noise and crosstalk. A coplanar waveguide routing style is an excellent choice for RF PCBs as they can be Read Article

PCB 3D Design Software Helps You Build Advanced Products

PCB 3D Circuit Design Software Helps You Build Advanced Products New products are intimately designed to fit their enclosures, and getting the design right takes the right set of PCB design tools. When you can see your entire board, you can spot layout errors and component collisions and make sure your new circuit board will fit inside its enclosure easily. Now you can design and evaluate all aspects of your circuit board layout when you use the native MCAD tools in Altium Designer’s complete PCB design Read Article