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What Solder Mask Expansion Value Should You Use?
The solder stop mask layer caps off the PCB and provides a protective film over copper on the surface layers. Solder mask needs to be pulled back from landing pads on the surface layer so that you have a surface where components can be mounted and soldered. This removal of the solder mask from a pad on the top layer should extend some distance around the edge of the pad, creating either NSMD or SMD pads for your components. How far back should
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Guide to Ceramic Capacitor Dielectrics and Other Types
Capacitor electrical behavior is determined, in part, by the capacitor dielectric. Learn all about capacitor dielectrics in this article.
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Ferrite Core Selection and Design Decisions
When designing a transformer or using a ferrite core inductor, you must use the correct design process, and there is no substitution for real-world final testing. Let’s look at the process.
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PCB Silkscreen Guidelines
PCB silkscreen helps ensure your board is easy to read and test, and it aids assembly by clearly indicating component locations.
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Design Your Small Circuit Board in Altium Designer
Large circuit boards, small circuit boards, and anything in between might seem like they need separate sets of PCB layout features. In reality, your PCB design software shouldn’t delineate your PCB design based on size. Whether you need to design a large or small circuit board, a design application with high-quality CAD tools will help you get the job done quickly and prepare your board for production. Small circuit board designs are much easier
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Build an Electronic PCB Schematic Symbols Library in Altium Designer
Electronic symbols are the basis for the CAD documents you’ll create before you prepare a circuit board layout. An electronic symbols library contains basic symbols and figures that are used in electrical drawings, and they need to be linked to the PCB footprints that will appear in your PCB layout. When you need to prepare and organize clear PCB layouts and electrical drawings, you need a reliable source of CAD symbols and PCB footprints, and it
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Quickly Replicate Circuits with a Connection Room in Your PCB Layout
Modern PCB designs can get very complex, and designers need tools to help them stay organized. Schematic sheets are a great start, but simply organizing different circuit blocks into different schematics is not enough to ensure your designs are organized. Altium Designer unifies your schematic design and PCB layout tasks into a single program, and it includes a PCB connection rooms feature to keep your circuit blocks synchronized. Here’s how you
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Keep Your Eagle Software Files When You Migrate to Altium
When your free design software and other programs like designing circuit boards with Eagle Software don’t include critical design features, you’re stuck finding a workaround with another design tool. The real price of budget design software is lost time, lost productivity, and headaches that arise from inconsistent workflows and compatibility problems. When it’s time to get serious about PCB design, it’s time to look at Altium Designer. Below we
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Online Circuit Block Diagram Maker: Your Guide to Building PCBs with Altium Designer
Some PCB design software packages make you feel like you’ve been bamboozled. On one hand, you’re told that you’ll have access to tools that will let you move through the entire design process. Then all of a sudden, you can’t finish your design without purchasing critical features as add-ons. Only Altium Designer integrates all the best design tools in a single circuit diagram maker. You can get access to free versions that include critical design
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Upgrade from AutoCAD PCB Design Software to Altium Designer's Unified Environment
Most designers are familiar with AutoCAD electrical PCB design software for mechanical or construction drafting, and for making important engineering diagrams. AutoCAD PCB design is great for many tasks involved in electrical or mechanical engineering, but PCB designers need more than mechanical drafting tools to make advanced electronics. To get your designs to the next level, you need the best set of ECAD tools on the market, rather than using
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Designing with Shock Management for Avionics PCBs
Of all the electronics application areas, there is one that needs to consider mechanical and thermal shocks during design: avionics. An avionics designed system that is put into production within a satellite, aircraft, or spacecraft can experience strong vibration and mechanical shock during flight, and these systems need to be designed with high reliability in mind. IPC standards, MIL-PRF standards, and other standards specify some design
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Customize Your PCB Drill Sizes With Altium Designer
Every PCB will need some holes, vias, slots, and other features that are defined in a PCB layout. These features need to be reflected in fabrication documents, and designers need tools to help them automate this process of creating documentation directly from their designs. It’s easy to keep track of your holes, vias, electrical behavior, and much more in Altium Designer, the industry’s top PCB design application for professional design engineers
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Design Your Metal Core PCB in Altium Designer
Most printed circuit boards use a thick FR4 core layer to provide structural stability and interior copper layers for a multilayer PCB. If problems like excessive heat and low thermal dissipation are required in your particular application, you might consider designing with a metal core PCB. You’ll see other advantages like greater structural integrity, as well as a natural EMI shield thanks to the internal metal core. These circuit boards
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Leveraging the Free Footprint Community to Design at Lightning Speed
In this article, we reviewed a few different offerings of free footprint library resources for Altium Designer. We also briefly covered how to migrate those libraries to your Altium 365.
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Designing 5G PCB Devices
The next stage in the evolution of mobile telephony is here with the roll-out of 5G. The designer looking to incorporate functionality to handle 5G signals into their circuits will face some challenging issues. So, what’s so special about 5G? The main change in the jump from 4G to 5G is the frequency band at which signals are transmitted. For 4G, this band covered 0.7 GHz up to 2.5 GHz. For 5G, this new band is an order of magnitude larger, with
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What Influences Electrolytic Capacitor Lifespan?
If you speak with a bunch of design engineers, you might quickly believe 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 were
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PCB Thermal Resistance: Theory and Management
The thermal conductivity of your PCB material stackup and arrangement of copper conductors are important factors that determine the thermal performance of your circuit board. You will likely need to include strategically placed thermal vias, a heat sink on each active component and power electronics, and active cooling measures near any other heat source on your circuit board. Copper in printed circuits has high thermal conductivity, while FR4
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