Thought Leadership

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

Resistor Derating to Improve Mean Time Between Failure

Resistor Power Derating to Improve Mean Time Between Failure All resistors have a specified power rating that determines the maximum energy they can convert without its performance degrading or the component failing. Read now to learn more. Read Article

PCB fabrication notes

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

AltiumLive Co-locates with IPC Apex Expo

AltiumLive Co-locates with IPC Apex Expo Two executives are joining us in today’s episode. Ted Pawela of Altium and IPC VP Dave Bergman. Join us and learn what’s coming in AltiumLive 2022 and IPC Apex 2022. Read Article

Comparing All Serial Communications Protocols

The Serial Communications Protocols Comparison At the end of this series, we summarize the advantages and disadvantages of each type of Serial Communication Protocol available to transfer information between microcontrollers, data-producing, and data-processing peripherals, and other intelligent devices. Read Article

ECAD MCAD Integration

Mechanical and Electrical Design Come Together With Altium’s MCAD CoDesigner Electronics designers working in small design houses or in large enterprises often encounter a common set of challenges when interfacing with mechanical designers. For many new products, the mechanical form factor requirements will constrain the electrical design collaboration in terms of physical layout, location of interfaces, and component selection. For many electronic products, flex and rigid-flex board designs require careful modeling of Read Article

PCB templates

How to Use Design Data and PCB Templates in the Cloud Altium 365 provides an easy way to store, manage, and access PCB templates as part of design reuse. Learn more in our short guide. Read Article

Gerber file formats

Your Guide to Gerber File Extensions in PCB Design Gerber files come with multiple extensions but in only two common file formats. You can learn more about Gerber file extensions in this article. Read Article

Electrolytic Capacitor Lifespan

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

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

Electronic Component Data

How to Automate Electronic Component Data Tracking Today’s design tools can help automate collection and tracking of electronic component data. Here’s how Altium Designer keeps your components healthy. Read Article

What is a Gerber file?

What Is A Gerber File and How Are They Used in the PCB Fabrication Process? Do you know what is a Gerber file? We've compiled the essential information you need to understand everything about Gerber files and their role in PCB fabrication. Read Article

SPI vs. I2C

SPI vs. I2C: How to Choose the Best Protocol for Your Memory Chips Which protocol is best for accessing memory chips? The differences between SPI vs. I2C for this application will be examined in this article. Read Article

Differential Pairs and Differential Signals

What Are Differential Pairs and Differential Signals? Differential pairs and differential signaling are the mainstay of high speed digital communication and data transfer. Read Article

Mode-Selective Transmission Line

Harness mmWave Routing with a Mode-Selective Transmission Line High frequency and data rate channels can be routed as a mode-selective transmission line. Here’s when you should consider this routing technique. Read Article

Meeting Standards: IPC 6012 Class 3 Via Sizes and Annular Rings

Meeting Standards: IPC 6012 Class 3 Via Sizes and Annular Rings Take a look at the above image of a PCB layout, specifically the vias and drill holes poking through the silkscreen. It's quite clear that some of these vias are off-center, meaning the drill hit that created these vias was not dead-center in the receiving land. This leaves behind an annular ring, something which might be considered a defect in certain IPC product classes. Under the IPC standards for rigid boards, we have several possible Read Article

Power Delivery System Design

Power Delivery Systems Design This article is intended to define the new challenges and provide guidance in how to successfully engineer the Power Delivery System (PDS) so it meets the needs of new technologies. As integrated circuit technology allows for billions of transistors on a single IC, it has resulted in very powerful systems on a chip. This has made it possible to put the equivalent of supercomputers inside video games, cell phones, and a host of other products that Read Article

PCB mount transformers

All About PCB-Mount Transformers Before you rectify your AC input down to DC, you’ll need to step down your mains power to the desired voltage with a PCB-mount transformer. Read Article