Altium Resources

One of my all time favorite videos (one of the few that I rewatch once per year) is "The Extreme Importance of PC Board Stack-Up with Rick Hartley". It's fantastic. https://resources.altium.com/p/the-extreme-importance-of-pc-board-stac…

What is "cool", (or a challenge if you design PCB like I do), is that this is not true for alternating current. For example, if you have a track that does a L on top side, and copper plane on bottom side, with an alternating signal, the return path will follow the L and not go back in a straight line. Those links have some explanations: https://resources.altium.com/p/what-return-current-path-pcb https://www.nwengineeringllc.com/article/how-to-design-your-pcb-return… https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/360472/real-current-re…

There are some absolute masters of PCB design on this site, I am far below that level, so take this all with a heap of salt. A lot of what follows is generally good advice but not everything is universally applicable. Basics: learn to use your EDA software, properly configure it with your board house's capabilities, get correct footprints, read and re-read and re-re-read the datasheets for everything you use. Study other similar designs and try to understand everything they're doing and _why_. - Place mounting holes and critical components first. Tiny boards and tiny components look bigger on-screen, zoom out to 1:1 real life scale as a sanity check! - Use as many of the largest decoupling caps you can get. You don’t need multiple caps in different sizes; this comes from the old days of leaded caps when parasitics would be bad - For power: use planes when possible; use a trace width calculator; always have a ground plane. - Generally speaking, use the widest traces you can. - There is a huge asterisk on this one, but most traces should be made as short as possible. Decoupling caps should be super close to where they're needed. This is one of the more common noob mistakes, but it can also lead you astray (making overly complex or compact PCBs on the first try.) - Do not put capacitors or inductors close to the edges of a board, they will fail because of flexing! - Check clearance between parts for pick and place and hand-soldered parts - Always run DRC checks (there…

On your note about capacitor sizes — at my first EE job, my boss taught me about capacitance-voltage derating[0] for ceramic capacitors and it was quite the revelation. There is a significant inverse relationship between the two, which no one tells you about in college! I'm now very careful to pick ceramic capacitors with enough headroom on their rated voltage as you lose a lot if you're close to the rated value. This curve is dependent on the different ceramic types as well (C0G, X7R, etc). Cheaper ceramics have a steeper rolloff. For personal projects I am very careful to pick higher quality ceramics (X7R if I can) and use caps rated to 2-3x my operating voltage. Likely overkill, but I'm not optimizing for cost at volume. [0] https://resources.altium.com/p/voltage-derating-ceramic-capacitors

For anyone else that also wants a much more in depth explanation, this hour long talk is a gem. https://resources.altium.com/p/2-the-extreme-importance-of-pc-board-st… That AC signal energy is contained in the field between the trace and it's return is such a powerful model compared to taking the DC model of "going the lowest impedance path" and just assuming it applies at AC. Very, very, very good talk. This model also automatically makes clear why you'd want signal-GND-GND-signal instead of a power plane because that side's signals will have coupling into the power plane. It is mentioned explicitly in the video as well.

Not exactly sure what you're looking at, but aren't they just stitching vias placed there for shielding purpose: https://resources.altium.com/p/everything-you-need-know-about-stitchin…

There is a similar requirement for PCB manufacturing known as 'Thieving' - If you don't have a certain amount of copper, plating will not be uniform. See: https://resources.altium.com/p/what-thieving-pcbs-and-why-it-done

This comes up all the time in the context of DRAM routing. See e.g. the first image at https://resources.altium.com/p/pcb-routing-guidelines-ddr4-memory-devi…

I had no idea these existed. This is going to moving make my tube amp so much less annoying. Thank you. https://resources.altium.com/p/how-do-ferrite-beads-work-and-how-do-yo…

Hi, @Timot05. I’m a former EE with 20 yrs experience working in the industry and have designed dozens of very large complex mixed signal PCBAs 4-32 layers, as well as about the same number of large FPGA SoC designs. I watched the demo video out of curiosity and here’s my 2 cents, though there is a lot to unpack here: First if you want to know the current state of “how does git look like in hardware” as far as PCBA design is concerned look at Altium which uses git under the hood now to provide a very nice visual way to show differences in both the schematic and PCB layout between versions that solves some real pain points for an EE and therefore EEs actually want it and use it. There are ways to create reusable, version controlled sub-circuits that get put into libraries as well: https://www.altium.com/altium-365/hardware-version-control https://resources.altium.com/p/introduction-git-altium-designer Whatever open source you build should be modeled after that. I found the above very nice after years of manually using git to version control PCBA designs developed in other ECAD tools like PADS, Orcad, Cadence etc. I even tried to get a couple EE’s and layout people to use my methods of git version control, documented in the README of course, but to no avail, most strictly hardware EEs (with no FPGA or SW background) either can’t grasp git or don’t see the point in spending the time on it. The same people will quickly pay $10k-15k a seat for Altium to get that slick UI…

There have been a handful of products that have tried to be an FPGA for analog circuits, but unfortunately those applications are far, far more sensitive to signal integrity issues, so it's harder to just abstract away all the intermediate fabric that connects up your function blocks the way you can with a digital circuit. This post explains further: https://electronics.stackexchange.com/a/25529 Here's an example [0] of some of the many considerations that come into play when laying out even a conventional PCB that handles analog signals, from which it's not hard to imagine how much more of issue basically all of that stuff would be when happening inside a single chip package— particularly when part of the point of analog circuits for audio processing is often to achieve the aesthetically interesting effects that happen when components are overdriven, oscillating or feeding back, in breakdown, etc. Not hard to see why modern programmable effects pedals just have a high speed DAC and do everything in discretized space. [0]: https://resources.altium.com/p/pcb-design-rules-analog-circuits