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Altium is paving the way for enhanced engineering by designing the next generation of tools unifying the PCB design industry. Whether you are looking for an easy to use drag and drop in browser PCB design software, how to get component data in real-time while designing a board, collaborative tools for systems engineers, interviews with industry pioneers, or the best PCB Design software, Altium has you covered! Read the latest information PCB Design from the industry's leading experts.

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ASC Free Technical eBook and Webinar Series Learn any issues upfront before sending your board design to manufacturing. Anaya Vardya and John Bushie of American Standard Circuits join us in this episode. Read Article

Component Shortages Report from IHS What are the coping strategies available for PCB Designers to face the challenging impact of component shortages in the industry? Watch and learn in this episode with expert Greg Wood of IHS. Read Article

Serial Communications Protocols - Part Three: RS-232 In this series of articles, we’re looking at some of the different types of Serial Communication Protocols available for transferring data between devices. The articles will cover a few of the more popular protocols and standards in use today, and at the end of this series, we will recap and compare the advantages and disadvantages of each. We hope this information will prove valuable next time you need to implement a serial communication bus in Read Article

Creating Elegant and Readable Schematics A schematic drawing will not only tell your PCB design software what needs to connect where, but it also communicates the purpose of a circuit to other people. It’s easy to create a schematic, but it can be harder to make a helpful schematic that can be quickly and easily read and comprehended by the reader. Anyone reading your schematic diagram should not have to try and trace wires around to figure out what they do or need to unscramble a Read Article

What Influences Electrolytic Capacitor Lifespan? If you speak with a bunch of design engineers, you might quickly form the opinion 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 Read Article

Must Have Rapid Prototyping Tools Suppose your job involves rapidly iterating designs or creating a wide variety of products for clients. In that case, there are some essential tools available that can save you a tremendous amount of time, bringing high engineering risk devices to completion successfully. Whether you’re working on internal projects or developing high mix devices for clients as a consulting or freelance firm, these indispensable tools will help you ship a higher Read Article

Transmission Line Reflection Coefficient View a numerical example of the transmission line reflection coefficient and how simulations can help you understand the results. Read Article

Thermal Management for Integrated Circuits As anyone who designs and builds electronic devices knows, the device will generate heat when it’s switched on. Wherever current flows through an impedance, energy losses will manifest themselves as heat, thanks to thermodynamics laws, whether in components, connections, wiring, or the PCB. The greater the loss, the greater the excess heat generated. While components with thermally enhanced packages are available to help manage any heat generated Read Article

Real-World Monitoring with Encoders Electrical devices don't tend to be useful unless they can interact with the real world, taking measures, producing outputs, or responding to events, for example. One functional ability that devices may require is the capability to measure physical movement. This may be a wheeled vehicle traveling across a surface or a fixed machine's shaft rotation. An encoder is a sensor that turns a position into an electrical signal. This position may be Read Article

Complete Guide to DIY SMT Assembly In Your Office I want to share a little secret with you in this article: Assembling SMT prototypes boards is not only easy, but it requires very little equipment. Using just a stencil, I can easily hand prototype down to 0.3 mm pitch ICs, and 0201 (imperial) sized passive components. Tiny wafer-scale components can definitely be a challenge, but the majority of prototypes that are regularly produced can be hand-assembled in a couple of hours with production Read Article

Four Commonly Held Myths of EMC Design “Don't gap your ground plane, there's never really a good reason to do that.” Dr. Hubing our guest for today is an EMC expert with 30 years of experience in the industry. Watch this episode or listen on the go now. Read Article

Comparing All Serial Communications Protocols At the end of this series, we summarize the advantages and disadvantages of each type of Serial Communication Protocol available to transfer information between microcontrollers, data-producing, and data-processing peripherals, and other intelligent devices. Read Article

Serial Communications Protocols - CAN and LIN In this article, Part 8 in our series of articles looking at different Serial Communication Protocols, we discuss the popular CAN and LIN protocols combined. Read Article

What is Multi-board Design? Learn more about what is multi-board design and how to use native 3D design with ECAD MCAD collaboration aids complex PCB layout. Read Article

Flexible Circuits: Getting Started Expert Tara Dunn tackles in detail the key benefits driving designers to use flexible materials. Read now to learn more. Read Article

Testing the Limits of Your LDO's Efficiency The efficiency of your LDO isn’t a fixed value, but neither is your maximum current output. Read about your LDO efficiency curve to better see why LDOs have narrow operating ranges. Read Article

Switched-Mode Power Supply PCB Layout Guidelines Create and simulate your design and follow these switched-mode power supply PCB layout guidelines. Read Article