Thought Leadership

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

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

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

PCB Manufacturing Trends and Challenges with Summit Interconnect Learn more about PCB manufacturing trends from Clay Swain, Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing, and Gerry Partida, Senior Field Applications Engineer. Read Article

Heidi Barnes, Senior Application Engineer and Power Integrity Product Owner Heidi Barnes is an anomaly in the PCB design world—a long-time, senior-level woman, and hardware engineer, whose career has been steeped in a wide variety of experiences with numerous technologies. Within the industry, she is widely recognized for her knowledge and expertise. Heidi holds five patents, was awarded the NASA Silver Snoopy for her work on hydrogen fire and gas detection, she is the author of over 20 papers on signal integrity and Read Article

Honeywell Claims the Most Powerful Quantum Computer of 2020 Quantum computing is about more than qubit count. See why Honeywell claims to have the most powerful quantum computer of 2020. 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

How to Generate Gerber Files in Altium Designer Step-by-Step Once you've got your PCB layout finished and you're ready to start preparing for manufacturing, one of the critical steps is to generate Gerber files. These files are used by PCB manufacturers to prepare stencils for photoresist exposure and subsequent etching. When you're ready to create your Gerber files, you need the right set of CAM tools that can take data from your PCB layout. Altium Designer helps make the process for generating Gerber 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

Packing and Shipping Your PCBs: Best Practices I mailed my last Christmas present yesterday, a few weeks after the holidays are over. I’m only a little embarrassed; I like to do a very precise job with wrapping even if I’m not terribly concerned with punctuality. The package was for a friend overseas who had a craving for her favorite American candies. Let me tell you: a beautiful wrapping job on a bag of fun-size Butterfingers is no small feat. Circuit board packing and shipping are more Read Article

Decoding PCB Fabrication Notes Your PCB fabrication notes contain important information that ensures your board can be manufactured exactly as you intend. See what you should include and what these mean. Read Article

Composite Amplifiers and How They Give the Best of Both Worlds There are many times where you need an amplifier with high gain, low noise, high slew rate, and broad bandwidth simultaneously. However, not all of these design goals are possible with all off-the-shelf components. One solution is creative use of multiple amplifiers in a composite amplifier design. With the right composite amplifier, you can create a unique amplifier that exploits the best characteristics of each amplifier stage. Here are some Read Article

Avoid Re-Placing the Same Parts Over and Over Again with a Pre-Placement Checklist Sometime during the evolution of the automobile, car makers decided that reading and understanding engine gauges were too difficult tasks for the average driver. To remedy this they substituted the check engine light instead; unlike the malfunction indicators of today which are computer controlled warnings, those early check engine lights would only tell you of a problem once it was occurring. Reporting a problem after it occurs is not the Read Article

Current Limiting Resistor LED Systems with Matching Voltage Power Supply Most of my friends in engineering live a balanced lifestyle. However, there are some engineers that are workaholics. These engineers do not limit their working hours and are constantly dealing with stress. Their lifestyle is not so different from an LED’s that is directly connected to a power supply without a current limiting resistor or with the wrong resistor value. They start out strong, but eventually flicker and burn out. In the architecture Read Article

Machine to Machine Communication and Internet of Things Can Benefit from Wireless Connectors Have you ever bought a new gizmo or gadget and wondered how you lived life before it? For me, smartphones obviously come to mind. When I was a kid I was content to play with sticks and rocks. Now my kids play with virtual sticks and rocks on their iPhones. High speed wireless connectors will be like that for the Internet of Things. Keyssa has developed a new short-range chip that operates in the 60 GHz band that they say will replace all Read Article

Best Practices for Using DNI/DNP Entries in Your PCB BOM You can use the DNI/DNP designation on components in your PCB BOM to create design variants as long as you’ve created your layout correctly. Read Article