PCB Design Blogs

Picking up from where we left off in the previous post , let’s look at some more new and interesting changes made in Hotfix 019. As you might already know, Allegro® System Capture is available both for designers who work alone, in small tea...

“The only constant in life is change” nowhere is this adage truer than in the world of software. Updates, releases, patches … They are a part of our lives as experts work behind the scenes to constantly improve and fine-tune what w...

Boards and Packages are getting extremely complex and large; what used to be considered large with millions of objects is now close to 100s of millions of objects. Traditional rendering on CPU of such large and complex designs is not scalable for tod...

The Download Manager user interface has been revamped in 17.4-2019 HotFix 019. Various new features are integrated to enhance user experience and efficiency. The latest release of Download Manager delivers modern UI architecture with a scope for future enhancements...

The HotFix 019 (QIR 3, indicated as 2021.1 in the application splash screens) update for Release 17.4-2019 of OrCAD and Allegro products is now available at Cadence Downloads. This blog post contains important links for accessing this update and introduces s...

IPC-2581 ensures efficient PCB design data transfer and brings advanced capabilities to extract all the required data for manufacturing and assembly. This includes netlist, test pad information, artwork, drill data, bill of materials, test files, and design variants. While exporting data, you can choose to suppress any information which is not needed for fabrication, assembly, testing, or procurement

This post is for those of you who have been creating logical designs and boards for a while. In most cases, a new product or design doesn’t require every component or module to be made from scratch. Most standard components are reused and, at t...

In our previous blog post, we discussed how to count the number of pins and rename reference designators using the SKILL codes available in the Allegro SKILL Code Library . In this blog post, let’s focus on how to create a stack and define globa...

PCB design complexities increase with the increase in the number of parts and layers in a design. For creating these complex designs with maximum efficiency, the design tool should be equipped with advanced features and functionalities. In the desig...

The tolerances are not unique to only PSpice or simulators, they are part of any problem requiring numerical methods of solutions involving reiterative steps that finally converge. For example, many data analysis applications will require ABSTOL and RELTOL. Let us then first try to understand what these tolerances exactly...

In part 1 of this blog post, we covered the model-less aspect of Allegro® System Capture’s Design Integrity solution and now here we are with part 2. So, maybe scrolling through or navigating 200-300 pages of a design to catch logic design ...

Almost every PCB design includes different types of shapes, mainly for ground and power connections. Shapes in a PCB usually represent copper areas. When designing a PCB, you might want to create a square at the board edge which is an exposed copper ...

While translating boards from different PCB design applications or changing design units in the later phase of a design cycle, a wide variety of mathematical round-offs may occur for geometric computations. As DRCs are logically computed, the DRCs cr...

Component heating, Joule heating, heat sinks…does the very idea of checking the stress of hundreds of devices on a board for various operating conditions make you reach for a cup of coffee? Is a ¼ Watt resistor dissipating 1/3 Watts? D...

A footprint is a graphical representation composed of pads used for connecting electronic devices to a PCB. Any error while creating a footprint can cause redesigning of the whole board. Therefore, creating the right footprint is important to the des...

Some people say that finding the right components for a design is the most time-consuming part of designing. If that is correct, you need all the help you can get to quickly locate what you need. You might need a specific type of component, a specifi...

As a designer, your requirement at the early stages of schematic design is quite different, that is the part information you need when it comes to implementing the schematic design and while simulating it for testing and analysis is different i...

Pin delays are used to specify the time delay or length from the internal package connection to the pin’s mounting layer. It is critical to include pin delays when tuning high-speed nets to ensure signal performance. Pin delays are used in the ...

The add-on model is applicable everywhere! You can choose a basic version of the car and add-on products make it faster, nicer, or more special. Air travel add-on includes seat reservation, food, priority check-in, and extra baggage. When you purchas...

After a quick overview of Allegro® System Capture , let’s start at the very beginning of the design process. Where are the parts? What parts can you use when creating an Allegro System Capture logical design? Parts, as you know, are the basi...

Many times, you would have required to create a standard pulse waveform that can be used for testing devices as per the industry standard. One good example is to simulate the ISO 7637-2 transient at the schematic design stage. This practice ensures t...

Design rules checks (DRC) determines whether your layout design complies with design constraints and highlights any violations. Performing DRC is an essential step of PCB development signoff before you generate manufacturing files. With increasing mi...

A design starts in the mind of an architect, gets drawn on whiteboards as basic block diagrams that describe a system. Next, designers see what can be reused from older designs, schematics get drawn, parts are identified, from in-house libraries or from online vendors. If the available parts don’t match their requirement, librarians are asked to create or modify parts. Then checks and rules are run to ensure design integrity...

Design companies often work with multiple PCB fabricators and each fabricator may have a different set of DFM rules. It is a customary practice followed by design companies to create a common denominator rule set that can be applied to all fabricator...

After completing a circuit, it’s time to run simulations. The first step is to define a simulation profile. A simulation profile controls which analysis is run and what resources are to be used, for example, the models which define the parts fo...