Thought Leadership

Altium works closely with the industry's leading experts to bring you these thought leadership resources on PCB Design.

PCEA is Here to Meet the Challenges of the PCB Design Industry Why is it important t be involved in the PCB Design community? How will it help your career growth? Tomas is here for a Part 2 episode, Watch or listen on the go now. Read Article

2020 Holiday Gift Ideas for Your Favorite Engineer Check out our list of the best holiday gifts for engineers in 2020. Read Article

Getting Started with Revision Control in Altium 365 Forget about tracking copies of project files, use the revision control tools in Altium 365 to track project revisions, and protect your design data. Read Article

SOURCE® Hydropanels Renewable Clean Water from the Air Cody Friesen joins the OnTrack podcast to discuss materials science, entrepreneurship, the ASUIO competition, and how he came to develop the hydropanel. Read Article

Bandwidth Requirements For Differential Signals This article provides an overview of the benefits of differential signaling and how it operates in a working electronic product. Read Article

Creating a Ground Plane for Your PCB Design It used to be that printed circuit boards seemed to have the same basic layer configuration, or at least that’s the way I tend to remember it. This meant that they were usually six layer multi-layer boards, with a ground plane and a VCC plane. The old CAD systems didn’t really have the ability to do much with power planes except to designate layers as a bottom layer or the like. The most you would see in them would be some “X’s” where there was Read Article

Identifying Minimum PCB Trace Spacing and Width in Altium Designer Taking the time to set up routing rules to govern the minimum trace spacing and trace width for PCB layout can be tedious. Many designers would prefer to jump in and start trace routing without going through this setup process first. This can be dangerous though as you may inadvertently route a trace routing at the wrong width, or pack your routing in so tightly that you don’t have the room to make any width corrections later on. The more rigid Read Article

Designing to Meet a Target BOM Price and PCB Cost Estimate Creating an accurate PCB cost estimate for design, components, production, assembly, shipping, and even firmware can be challenging tasks for new designers. Even established organizations can have trouble getting it right as it's hard to anticipate every problem that can arise during a design. Manufacturers can help you handle the production and assembly portion of a project, but any time a new design needs to be put into production, components Read Article

Preventing Ground Loops in Your PCB Design I think we’ve all been there. You buy that awesome stereo system only to hear that familiar humming sound in the background. When you take it back to the store the clerk blames the manufacturer. What components are to be considered a problem? The decoupling capacitor or ground wire? How about the bypass capacitor or ground loop interference? The stereo manufacturer will blame the component manufacturer and the component manufacturer can’t blame Read Article

Understanding Ground Planes in Your Two-Layer PCB Back when I was a young and hungry grad student, my first PCB ground plane design was used to collect analog signals from several sensors. When looking at a voltage graph of my measurements, the noise level was horrible and completely masked the signal I was trying to measure. I soon realized that I had completely bungled my ground plane connections, and ground loops were ruining my signals. Placing your ground plane and routing to ground are two Read Article

The Mysterious 50 Ohm Impedance: Where It Came From and Why We Use It 50 Ohm impedance became the standard impedance used in RF transmission lines long ago, but it is still useful today and is a standard reference impedance used in test equipment. Read Article

The SOSA Standard: What PCB Designers Need to Know Learn more about the new SOSA standard for embedded systems. PCB designers working on aerospace and military embedded systems will need to design to this standard. Read Article

Common Printed Circuit Board Defects You Can Fix in the Cloud Solve these printed circuit board defects you can fix with the cloud collaboration tools in Altium Designer. Read Article

Sync Your Electronics Inventory Management System With the Cloud Do you use internal databases and tracking tools for electronics inventory management? Sync your inventory management system with the cloud. Read Article

Working with Customer PCB Fabrication Data Through the Cloud Manufacturing won’t begin until you can receive and inspect PCB fabrication data from customers. Here’s how Altium 365 helps by bringing design and fab data into Altium Designer. Read Article

Looking Forward: 2021 Industry Trends and Events to Watch for Where are we going in these crazy times? Mike Buetow shares with us what to look out for, the current trends, and what will help you be a better design engineer in 2021. Read Article

IPC-2551 Digital Twin Standard Released Read our brief on the new IPC-2551 standard and how digital twins might be used in the PCB industry. Read Article