Techdays

Circuit boards rarely operate in isolation. Working with enclosures housing multiple board designs is a growing scenario in the electronics industry. You need to manage the whole system connections, resolve conflicts, and update system-child projects. Then you have to coordinate separate board rotation, alignment, and enclosure fit. How do you conquer all of these [...]

When you’re working through a complex PCB layout, it always helps to know the shortcuts you can use to stay productive. Altium Designer® keyboard shortcuts, and keyboard + mouse shortcuts, can help you easily walk through your PCB layout during design and as part of final checks during a design review. The other very [...]

Surprises can be fun. Surprise parties, surprise gifts and possibly surprise visits (depending on whom). Supply chain surprises on the other hand are no fun at all; they can derail your budget, deadlines, and build quality. When electronic components become obsolete, design and production can suffer lengthy delays. With an average of 15 end-of-life [...]

SPICE simulation saves you critical time in the prototyping phase. Understanding your simulation interface makes it simple to analyze how your circuits work in different scenarios. Altium Designer provides an intuitive, dedicated interface to support your simulation verification, setup, and analysis directly in your schematic environment. You also benefit from growing support for popular [...]

Fortunately, PCB design systems like Altium Designer have been created to make design reuse easy. A unified design environment really helps so that the sheets, the schematic, and the layout all easily synchronize with each other without having to be forced. Altium gives you different options to work with when doing design reuse including: [...]

With modern digital designs featuring high-speed circuitry, multiple devices, densely populated boards, and multiple supply rails, the demands placed on a design's DC power distribution network warrants a more analytical approach to its design. The DC analysis of a Power Delivery Network (PDN), or the results of its DC Power Integrity (PI-DC), is basically [...]

Working with local libraries seems like a simple solution, but we often don’t take into account the added time spent maintaining libraries and sharing them between team members. There is no good way to avoid duplicate efforts with component creation and no standardization to ensure consistent naming. Worst of all, there is no way [...]

PCB real estate is not what it used to be, and with projects, deadlines are always around the corner, you need every tool, tip, and trick to help you through your PCB routing finish line. Even after you did everything you could to optimize your routing, that last 10% is always the most challenging. [...]

Working with local libraries seems like a simple solution, but we often don’t take into account the added time spent maintaining libraries and sharing them between team members. There is no good way to avoid duplicate efforts with component creation and no standardization to ensure consistent naming. Worst of all, there is [...]

The challenges faced by today’s designers are rapidly increasing in scope and complexity. This leaves less time to properly organize, manage, and share the design data they create. Typically, unless they have access to dedicated IT resources, they are left with a choice. They can either implement and maintain an ECAD data management system [...]