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Explore content from blog posts to technical white papers gathered together for your convenience. All written by Altium's community of PCB design experts.

OnTrack Newsletter - July 2019 Vol 3. No. 3 OnTrack Newsletter July 2019 VOL. 3 No 3 AltiumLive 2019: The Hat Trick The third annual AltiumLive: Annual PCB Design conference is almost here again and will be located in San Diego and Frankfurt. Learn more about all that’s in store for this year’s event and how we plan to pull off a perfect hat trick! Read Article EIPC: A European Community of PCB Professionals In mid-June, I had the great pleasure of attending my first EIPC Conference in Read Article

5 Helpful Tips To Increase Schematic Productivity In Altium Designer Altium Designer has many shortcuts and features to increase your productivity during the schematic creation process. By understanding and utilizing the features described here, you’ll expedite the schematic creation process and hopefully have fun doing it. Here are 5 key productivity enhancers you should know for schematic capture. Disconnect and Move Symbol: CTR + Click & Move. Move a part without connected wires. By default when you move a Read Article

Gerry Partida on Wrap Plating Gerry Partida is back to talk to us about wrap plating and via filling and what the benefits, requirements and drawbacks of this technology are, and what you need to know about designing these and how this technology drives cost. Listen to the Podcast: Download this episode (right click and save) Watch the Podcast: Show Highlights: Gerry is the Director of Engineering at Summit Interconnect with 35 years of experience in the PCB industry, of Read Article

AltiumLive 2019: The Hat Trick In October 2019, the third and largest AltiumLive: Annual PCB Design Summit will be held in San Diego (October 9-11) and Frankfurt (October 21-23). When we first began AltiumLive, we had a simple vision: to help PCB design engineers Learn, Connect, and Get Inspired. So, we built an AltiumLive community which included industry experts, PCB design engineers, supply chain professionals, students, and inspiring innovators that are altering the Read Article

Robert Feranec on How to Implement The PCB Design Process In this episode, we talk with Robert Feranec, a familiar name to many of our listeners. Apart from being a popular YouTuber, he’s also the founder and CEO of FEDEVEL Academy where he teaches PCB Design to people around the world. Robert shares what it takes to be a popular YouTuber, the work it takes to produce all the great content he creates and as a special bonus we’ll discuss Robert’s Keynote that he will deliver at AltiumLive PCB Summit this Read Article

Silicon Photonics Integration Challenges in PCB Design Silicon photonics will use the same manufacturing processes used in silicon ICs I was honored to meet Richard Soref at a recent IEEE conference and discuss the current state of electronic-photonic integrated circuits (EPICs). The man is often called “the Father of Silicon Photonics”, and for good reason. If you ask him nicely, he’ll tell you how to build all the fundamental logic gates as photonic circuits directly on silicon. Now is a landmark Read Article

Flex Circuit Specific Terms and Definitions Recently, I was having a few discussions with someone very new to flex design. I was trying to be helpful and going through several things that are specific to flex and rigid flex design which should be considered as you start your first design. He was listening and taking notes, and suddenly stopped me and said, “you lost me a few items back, I am not completely sure I understand this terminology.” This flashed me back to memories of my early Read Article

Stacking The Odds In Your Favor: Mastering The Art of Stackup Design As everyone knows, the PCB stackup is the substrate upon which all design elements are assembled. And, it is incumbent upon the product development engineer to own the PCB stackup process which includes calling out the exact type of laminate, prepreg and copper needed in every layer of the stackup as well as taking into account all of the electrical characteristics of the PCB to ensure a design that is fully functional from both a mechanical and Read Article

It’s Your Loss: Determining And Controlling Loss In The PCB Design Process When it comes to designing a high-speed PCB, we always have to factor in the dynamic of signal loss. And, there are lots of areas where loss can occur. Accounting for all of these aspects of loss can be a challenging and time-consuming task as too much loss can prevent a high-speed PCB from functioning properly. This article will address the various aspects of loss, how they factor into the PCB design process, and how loss can be effectively Read Article

New Multilayer Architecture: Power Mesh It’s funny how we accept the status quo as the only reality because it’s the only existence we’ve been subject to. In printed circuit design, the multilayer architecture is one such status quo. But it is not the only architecture that will work for high-speed designs. At Hewlett-Packard, we experimented with and implemented a higher performance architecture based on RF Design characteristics. It was not by accident, as our PCB design organization Read Article

Understand the AC and DC Return Path on a High-Performance Mixed-Signal PCB High performance mixed-signal PCBs are difficult to design. Proper grounding and routing are essential to ensure accurate ADC conversion. In this article we’ll discuss a complex topic; the importance of designing a controlled current path on high performance mixed (Analog/Digital) PCBs, and how this impacts the performance of your board. What are we going to learn? • Loop currents follow different path (depends from their frequency range.) • How Read Article

SMTA for Young Professionals The SMTA is an international non-profit with chapters across the world in the US, Canada, Mexico, India, Europe, Brazil, Hong Kong and Malaysia. Since it’s invention in the 1960’s; Surface Mount Technology has helped reduce waste, reduce consumer costs, and most importantly, reduce environmental impact. This industry is creative and inventive. Everything we touch has been engineered. Our industry leaders shape the world around us. Our goal as an Read Article

It’s All Analog “It’s all analog!” I would state emphatically, often banging the table for effect. Those in the room that knew me would continue working, those that didn’t believe me could be seen to roll their eyes, but sometimes I would get the attention of a new hire or someone just out of school, and they might ask “what about digital?” The time was the middle of the 1980s, and I was working at Commodore Business Systems as a senior design engineer, which Read Article

Insertion Loss Deviation or Intersymbol Interference Noise? In a previous blog, I discussed how channel quality is quantified by eye patterns [1]. There, it is explained how eye patterns are created from the thru S-parameters only. So, if you are using the thru S-parameters alone, do reflections even matter? Intuitively, it would seem like they don’t matter since they are not directly used to calculate the eye pattern. But, of course reflections matter! Reflections cause signal integrity problems, and I’d Read Article

Custom Footprint Creation in Altium Designer Download PDF

29:51 Efficient Polygon Practices Creating, deleting, and modifying the polygon pours on your board is something you do every day, but are you doing Watch Video

Agile Development for Embedded Systems: The Best of Both Worlds You might want to use agile development to build this embedded system As unique hardware platforms that provide computing power in a variety of applications, embedded systems combine the best of every techie’s dreams: hardware design and software development. Design processes for simpler embedded systems tend to be linear, and the hardware and embedded software may even be developed in parallel by different design teams. As systems become more Read Article