Altium Designer 18 Beta - Intro to the New UI

Created: July 13, 2017
Updated: March 16, 2020

Recent Articles

Capacitive load termination

How To: Impedance Matching and Terminating Capacitive Loads Impedance matching and capacitive load termination are examined in this article. Read Article

Series Termination Resistance Calculation

Series Termination Resistor Calculation You might need to determine the right series termination resistance value for this type of circuit With transmission lines, some things never seem to be simple. Determining the termination technique and the values of components in a termination network shouldn’t be a difficult task. Most PCB design programs force you to look online for calculators, or you’ll have to run the calculations by hand. Instead, your design software should make it easy Read Article

Power plane return path

Power Plane and Ground Planes: Should You Use Your PCB Power Plane as a Return Path? Power planes (sometimes called a power layer) and ground planes are important for more than just distribution of supplying power. When defining reference planes, both with impedance controlled routing and in managing return paths, your stackup might force return currents to pass into a PCB power plane before being coupled back to a ground layer. Even though you define a GND reference layer as a the basis for your impedance-controlled trace width Read Article

Backplane Routing Topology

Backplane Routing Topology for Gigabit Copper and Fiber Networks Backplanes are the backbone of modular computing platforms, providing a fabric that interlinks pluggable daughtercards in a single system. The design of backplanes must support interfaces on the daughtercards, often at high data rates reaching multiple Gbps. Some standards also specify system design requirements that support RF or fiber integration into these systems. The RF and fiber portion is normally integrated through a specialized connector Read Article

PCB copper roughness

How Much PCB Copper Surface Roughness is Too Much? When we talk about copper roughness, we always bring it up as if it were a universally bad thing. The fact is, some circuits will always function just fine even if the copper is rough. As long as your traces are fabricated to spec in every other area, the roughness of the traces might not matter as long as your operating frequency or bandwidth are low enough. Just what constitutes “low enough” and when is the effect of roughness so small that we Read Article

differential pair impedance calculator

Differential Pair Impedance: Using a Calculator to Design Your PCB Do you know what to look for in your differential pair impedance calculator? We've compiled the important information you need to know in this short guide. Read Article

Phase noise measurement with spectrum analyzers

How to Take a Phase Noise Measurement in a PCB There are plenty of noise sources in your PCB, ranging from thermal noise to EMI received from external sources. Phase noise is one noise source that occurs in analog signal sources like reference oscillators and frequency synthesizers. This type of noise affects the timing of analog signals and it arises due to contributions from other noise sources. If you’re debugging a high frequency board with a reference oscillator, then you might need to Read Article

skew sources high speed PCB

Addressing Skew Sources in High Speed PCBs Sometimes, when we talk about skew, we aren't as specific as we should be. Most discussions of skew and jitter deal with the type of skew incurred during routing, namely due to length mismatches in differential pairs and fiber weave-induced skew. In fact, there are many different sources of skew that contribute to total jitter on an interconnect, and it's important to quantify these in serial and parallel buses that require precise timing control Read Article

The Skin Effect, Current Density, and the Electromagnetic Field

The Skin Effect, Current Density, and the Electromagnetic Field Do you know how the skin effect alters the electric and magnetic field around a transmission line? We’ll address an important misconception in this article. Read Article

Know the Impedance

Know the Impedance Is understanding impedance really complicated? Expert Tuomas Heikkila will walk us through the basics of impedance. In this article, you will learn where impedance originated which will help you when designing your PCB or electronic projects. Read Article

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