Thought Leadership

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

Component Shortages Report from IHS What are the coping strategies available for PCB Designers to face the challenging impact of component shortages in the industry? Watch and learn in this episode with expert Greg Wood of IHS. Read Article

What Influences Electrolytic Capacitor Lifespan? If you speak with a bunch of design engineers, you might quickly form the opinion that the electrolytic capacitor has a particularly dubious reputation. This view certainly hasn’t been helped by the so-called “capacitor plague” that occurred in the first few years of the new millennium. A faulty electrolyte mix used in these types of capacitors led to premature device failures, and quite often, a “bit of a mess” was made to the PCBs on which they Read Article

Transmission Line Reflection Coefficient View a numerical example of the transmission line reflection coefficient and how simulations can help you understand the results. Read Article

Thought Leader Article, Dave Huntley, PDF Solutions In an ideal world where ideal products are developed, we would never have any issues resulting from any step in the design, fabrication, assembly, test and field operation processes. But in the real product development world that we inhabit, it is a fact that some level of undesired quality and reliability issues will occur. We continually look for novel ways to address these manufacturing issues especially as the components and the PCBs where Read Article

Best Practices for Using Generic Components in Your PCB Project Anytime you need to create a new design, you’ll start your search for the perfect components to give your new product the functionality it needs. Everything from resistors to complex ICs and powerful processors need to have component footprints and schematic symbols. The strategy is often to start by selecting specific components from the supply chain first, then place them into design documents. One strategy to approach a new design is to place 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

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

PCB Testing 101: Important Methods and Metrics PCB testing must occur during fabrication, assembly, and board bring-up. Here’s how you can plan to be successful during testing and inspection. Read Article

Reduce CM Noise in Your Power Supply with Impedance Balancing You can use impedance balancing to reduce conducted common-mode noise in your power supply. Here’s how it works and some experimental results. Read Article

Using Altium 365 for Sharing Simulations in the Cloud Altium 365 allows you to share your cloud simulation models and data with your signal integrity team and test engineer. Read Article

How to Speed Up Your DFM Report Process in the Cloud Make sure your design will be produced with high quality and yield with our DFM analysis guidelines. You’ll want to perform DFM analysis at multiple stages during the design process. Read Article

Antipad Diameter, Crosstalk, and IBM’s Results from IPC APEX EXPO 2021 Interlayer crosstalk begins with antipad diameters, and IBM’s results help us see how antipad diameter on back-drilled PTHs affect signal integrity. Read Article

Microstrip Ground Clearance: How Close is Too Close? Make sure to account for microstrip ground clearance when using copper pour on the surface layer. We’ll examine what happens with microstrips, striplines, and coplanar waveguides. Read Article

How to Design Castellated Holes in a PCB for an SMD Module Modules on small PCBs can be quickly surface-mounted to a carrier board withe castellated holes. Here’s how you can design castellated holes. Read Article