PCB Design Tools

Overview

Here’s a list of some useful design tools which come in useful when making PCBs.

Altium

Altium is a professional, licensed electronic CAD design package, whose two core components are schematic and PCB design. For more info, see the Altium subsection of this blog.

Saturn PCB Toolkit

http://saturnpcb.com/pcb_toolkit.htm

Very simple but extensive PCB design aid. And it’s free! Includes a via current calculator, trace width calculator, bandwidth calculator, differential pair calculator, mechanical data, conductor impedance calculator, unit conversions, planar inductor calculator, thermal resistance calculator and more!

Standard Resistor Calculator

http://www.daycounter.com/Calculators/Standard-Resistor-Value-Calculator.phtml

Invaluable when working out the closest manufactured resistor to the value you need in your design. There are tons of web-based calculators out there, and most let you choose a resistor series (e.g. E12, E24 e.t.c), or a precision (e.g. 5%, 1%). The higher the precision (1% is higher than 5%), the more expensive the resistor.