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Unified Design

Collaborative Design Part 1: Designing PCBs as a Unified Team

Collaborative Design Part 1: Optimizing PCB Design in Teams Electronic design isn't a solo gig anymore. Teamwork among dozens or hundreds of designers, engineers, suppliers, manufacturers, and any number of other people is essential for bringing a product to market. This blog series explores the ways to cut through the barriers and reduce some of the tedious back-and-forth dialog that slows design cycles to a crawl. In part 1, we'll take a look at what kinds of features make for effective collaboration Read Article

Reducing Metastability in FPGA Designs

Reducing Metastability in FPGA Designs Here, we take a look at the concept of metastability in regards to digital circuits – and therefore FPGA designs – and how its 'appearance' can be greatly reduced simply by adhering to proven design principles that mitigate its effect. Metastability! You could be forgiven for thinking this might be related to the integrity of some futuristic containment vessel, or force-field: "The metastability of the warp drive's flux triangulator and cryonic Read Article

Creating a custom Altium pick and place file

Creating a custom Altium pick and place file I recently worked with a customer who had to generate a nonstandard pick and place file because his assembly house was using antiquated equipment and could not accept a standard Altium pick and place file. I thought it might be helpful to show how to use the Bill of Material generator within Altium Designer^® to create a custom report to meet such needs. I recently worked with a customer who had to generate a nonstandard pick and place file Read Article

Power Nets Management: Circuit Board Best Practices

Power Nets Management: Circuit Board Best Practices A recent BugCrunch item (Power input vs output) raised the long standing issue of power management in Altium Designer^®. PCB fabrication can be a complicated process when considering all of the items that go into it. Between the vias, solder mask, and solder, things can get messy. To ensure we are all on the same page, I have some opinions on PCB assembly before work gets started. As always, I will be very interested in your thoughts and comments Read Article

The Hateful Five of PCB Manufacturing

The Hateful Five of PCB Manufacturing You just completed your last design review, got that needed approval signature, and the finish line has never been closer, or so you think. Even after your components are sourced and your board is laid out perfectly, the biggest challenge is yet to come - ensuring that all those months of design and team effort don’t go to waste when it comes time to communicate design intent to manufacturing. But how do you navigate this stage of your post Read Article

How to Simplify and Automate Your PCB ECO Workflow

Automating PCB Design Environments: How to Simplify and Automate Your PCB ECO Workflow Shuffling different programs for your schematic and PCB layout design changes costs both time and money. Altium Designer^® tackles this issue with a unified design system that automatically transfers data between schematic and PCB using component links. Read on to learn how component links are increasing productivity by automating ECO procedures. Transferring data from schematic to PCB, or vice versa, is traditionally a task stretched across Read Article

Personalizing Your Altium Designer Experience

Personalizing Your Altium Designer Experience The “one-stop-shop” approach to electronics design provides engineers with all the PCB software they need, all at their fingertips. However, since there’s so much going on in the Altium Designer^® package, it can get overwhelming. How can you manage this plethora of functionality effectively? Modern PCB design software employ an ever growing collection of features and functionality. One of the leaders in this area is Altium, which provides users Read Article

Experience a Completely Unified Design Environment

Experience a Completely Unified Design Environment With today’s ever growing market expectations, strict project deadlines, and increasingly complex designs, what solutions exist to minimize the time spent switching between your design tools to complete projects? Now you can successfully deliver products on time and within budget in a completely unified design environment. Read on to find out how. Do you feel like your schematic and pcb tools are from different planets? Are you still using a Read Article

Syncing Your Schematics and PCB Layouts Increases Efficiency and On-Time Delivery

Synced Up Designs: Syncing Your Schematics and PCB Layouts Increases Efficiency and On-Time Delivery A while back, I was working at a company that designs and installs systems for automating smart irrigation and environmental monitoring. We had gotten into the habit of making last minute “hacks” (pin swapping, gate swapping, etc.) to our boards to accommodate a specific need from a job (or to compensate for a design flaw or oversight on a particular model after getting it back from the manufacturer). While this improvisatory method worked in the Read Article