Altium Cheat Sheet

[Cheryll Witting]

Whenyou need to prepare a new design for manufacturing, one of the important docuements you'll need to produce at scale is a PCB fabrication drawing. This drawing shows all of the important information that workers on the line will need to understand the construction of a PCB. A fabrication drawing does more than show an image or rendering of the fabricated board, it also tells the fabrication house all of the requirements the fabricated PCB must meet in order to be accepted.

The other benefit of a thorough and complete fabrication document is that it helps ensure your board can be produced at multiple manufacturers. By compiling a set of consistent requirements into a single location, you have a set of data you can give to any fabricator so they can quickly quote your board for production.

The Draftsman feature in Altium Designer gives users a quick way to generate these drawings without the need for an external drafting application. The Draftsman tool automatically generates professional drawings with information pulled directly from your PcbDoc file. If you're unsure what you should include in your fabrication drawing, we've prepared a cheat sheet to help you get started. Keep reading to see all the information you can include in your PCB fabrication drawing.

Every PCB fabrication drawing needs to have some basic information that lists the requirements of your finished board. Some of these requirements are related to qualification, such as testing and performance metrics, while others concern physical construction of the PCB. Some of the primary information required to produce a fabrication drawing includes:

To show some of the important information found in a PCB fabrication drawing, we created an example Draftsman document that highlights the available fabrication and documentation features available in Draftsman. The drawing below shows an example of what might be used as a cover sheet for a longer fabrication drawing PCB. This drawing contains a general description of the PCB, and some of the information a fabrication house might need to prepare to plan processing steps.

An impedance table and the layer stack table are important for high speed PCBs that require controlled impedance verification. The fabrication house will use this information to select materials and verify impedances from a TDR mesurement on a test coupon in the event your desired material set is unavailable or does not produce the required impedance specification. The rest of the specifications in your general description will help plan out the rest of the fabrication and finishing process.

The following image shows a typical drill drawing and drill table, which includes drill hole sizes for plated and unplated holes. The finished (plated) hole size will normally include 1 mil plating, so the finished hole diameter will be about 2 mil smaller than value listed in the drill table. This page also contains a complete set of PCB fabrication notes that include important fabrication instructions and requirements. The fabrication notes provide may also include important testing procedures for specialty boards, as well as conformance requirements to relevant industry standards for the finished product.

The final image shown below shows an etch configuration for each layer. In drafting applications, these layers would normally be imported into a drawing from DXF files or Gerber files. If these layers are not exported correctly into a DXF format, there can be incorrect scaling or other drawing errors that cause the draft to have incorrect or missing etch information. Due to the very complex structure of etched layers in a PCB, the layers in the fabrication drawing, the Gerber files, and the PCB layout have to be compared in order to catch any errors. This is very time consuming and

Instead of exporting DXF files or Gerbers, and then re-importing these into your drafting application, Draftsman will generate the drawing shown below automatically using the data from your PcbDoc file. Simply right-click anywhere in the document and select Place Fabrication View from the dropdown menu. The placed fabrication view can then be edited to select the desired scale and layer. The best practice is to arrnage these layres in a single page so that the fabrication team can check the panel order against the etch data in the fabrication view.

A Draftsman document brings an elegant, yet powerful solution for creating fully customizable fabrication drawing PCBs quickly and easily. Everything you need for creating your PCB fabrication drawing - including PCB parameters, drilling and impedance tables, and PCB stackup layers - can be placed in a matter of minutes.

Zachariah Peterson has an extensive technical background in academia and industry. He currently provides research, design, and marketing services to companies in the electronics industry. Prior to working in the PCB industry, he taught at Portland State University and conducted research on random laser theory, materials, and stability. His background in scientific research spans topics in nanoparticle lasers, electronic and optoelectronic semiconductor devices, environmental sensors, and stochastics. His work has been published in over a dozen peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings, and he has written 2500+ technical articles on PCB design for a number of companies. He is a member of IEEE Photonics Society, IEEE Electronics Packaging Society, American Physical Society, and the Printed Circuit Engineering Association (PCEA). He previously served as a voting member on the INCITS Quantum Computing Technical Advisory Committee working on technical standards for quantum electronics, and he currently serves on the IEEE P3186 Working Group focused on Port Interface Representing Photonic Signals Using SPICE-class Circuit Simulators.

While Altium Designer is a relatively easy program to start working with, there are so many tricks, shortcuts and extra options to be discovered (which keeps me excited to always learn more!). I decided to create some kind of cheat-sheet for personal reference and I believe that it can also be helpful for other users out there.

If you are overwhelmed by the number of connections when routing a PCB, and you intend to pour a ground plane, you should hide the GND net. View Connections Hide Net

If your board features a few polygon planes, such as ground planes, it is easier to manage them through Tools Polygon Pours Polygon Manager. Multiple pours on many layers slow down Altium and make routing hard. Shelve polygons to alleviate this.

The most common reason for being unable to import changes from the schematic editor to the PCB is because you have forgotten to give components a valid designator (still is suffixed with a ? or duplicated designator), or the footprint for a component can not be found.

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After the success of our other OrCAD keyboard shortcut infographics, we decided to create one for Allegro users. The Allegro Keyboard Shortcuts Cheat Sheet includes common shortcuts Allegro users utilize in an easy to read, infographic format.

You can print and download the cheat sheet here and the bonus sheet here for your own personal use. So now instead of scouring the internet trying to find those simple, effective, and time-saving shortcuts for Allegro, you can find them right here, in one (or two) printable cheat sheets.

Has anyone developed a "cheat sheet" of sorts that describes the appropriate use of distribution types for different types of data? For example, beta for coin-type data (e.g. Therapy versus control), poisson for counts...

Check the Statistics 110: Probability course by Joe Blitzstein (Harvard University). Materials and lectures are freely available online as well as his handbook Introduction to Probability. Blitzstein provides many examples of common probability distribution and "stories" behind them, that make it easier to memorize what is the general idea behind them.

So for one of my computer science classes, we have a WhatsApp chat among all students in the class to network and help each other out with questions regarding homework, or if we have any confusion on assignments. It's a given that we can get help on these types of assignments.

But exams are proctored online, and getting help on them is strictly forbidden. However, some students in the chat have posted to the WhatsApp chat during their proctored exams, posting photos of the exams, the questions, and receiving help from others during their exams.

Why would I care about this? So normally, when a student cheats on an exam, it would have no effect on another student because the two overall students' grades are unrelated. However, the exams are curved. So these students that cheated on the exams **not only have an unfair advantage, ** but they also put other students at a disadvantage. Them doing exceptionally better than they would have has the potentiality to reduce other students grades by up to 10-15% of what it would be. So if Student A would normally get a 65 because they don't know the content, they now get a 89, thus, throwing off the entire curve. However, student B who actually DID try his hardest and studied got an 74. Their grade would have been higher with the curve, but student A cheating disrupted the curve. As a result, student B gets an 79, where they would've had an 84 without the several cheaters with almost perfect exam scores at the top.

Personally, I hate to be 'that girl' that reports someone else like a snitch... But I worked so hard in this class. I studied for 6 hours every day before this exam, and got an 83... and these people admit in chat that they would probably fail if they didn't use WhatsApp (have it screenshotted-saying that exactly). So I worked so hard and got an 83. They cheated and got a solid 90, doing no studying, no hard work on their own part. They work full time, so they complain they don't have time. But how is that my fault, or the fault of the other students that the cheater makes different life choices, or chooses to put less time into school, and we as a result should suffer? That's my rationale for wanting to report them. I play fair, so why should we suffer because they don't?

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