Teardrops Tips & Tricks in Altium Designer

[@ThePcbdznr]

That is outstanding. One more reason among many why I am delighted to use Altium. They actually look at our comments! Thanks Zach. Extremely helpful video, as usual. I owe you a beer whenever I can get to an IPC expo.

[@AltiumAcademy]

Our pleasure!

[@NaderMoshrefi]

Hello Zach, great feature and Video, can you please post the github link of project you mentioned ?

[@adrianwikipedia]

Hi Zach, great video! To get the bigger teardrop, you may have to uncheck the "Adjust Teardrop size" box. Although playing around with it might be necessary as well. For instance, getting length and width to 200% resulted in a nice and large teardrop but changing one of its parameters to 150% reduced both length and width.

[@AltiumAcademy]

Cool, thanks!

[@thai19995]

Hi Zach, great video :) small question: How do you configure Altium such that the tracks are visible within the pad? (as at 1:55, you can still see the track inside the pad) Thank you very much in advance.

[@Zachariah-Peterson]

Try using the View Configuration panel. You can configure the transparency of different objects in the PCB layout, and I as I recall you can change the transparency of pads in that panel. I often do this with polygons so that it is easier to make out tracks.

[@Dr.Bigglesworth]

Thank you for the video. When it says %, what is it a % of? The trace width is what I am guessing. But, why would the teardrop be based on that? I am trying to add teardrops that are the full width of the via, on vias, and of the pads, on pads. I've tried setting the % widths to 100, and even 500, and I can't get it to do what I want. It would be a really nice idea to be able to select an object, say a via or group of vias, then right click, and have a "teardrop" option that just added the teardrops to the selected vias. Having to select them, then to to a menu then a dialog is a bit cumbersome.

[@Zachariah-Peterson]

From what I can see, it is the width of the pad/via at the point where the teardrop curve is tangent to the pad. Since that is the definition, you would technically never be able to hit exactly to the full width of the pad, but you can get pretty close if you set the teardrop length long enough. The reason for the varying teardrop size is for high density layouts or in RF layouts, when you are at high density a long teardrop could interfere with other routing. In RF designs like the radar boards I've done, I've used the teardrop as a linear taper for mmWave impedance matching, you have to very precisely set the length of the teardrop and the width, otherwise you match to the wrong bandwidth and the system might not work. For most stuff, the default teardrop settings should be fine.

[@supernumex]

great video!

[@AltiumAcademy]

Glad you enjoyed it

[@sparklee6994]

I added teardrops to some selected vias, however, it only added teardrops to the top layer traces and left the bottom traces unchanged. which also are connected to the vias. Is there anything I missed?

[@Zachariah-Peterson]

There should be an option for it in the Teardrops dialog in the PCB Editor

[@rodo5502]

Hi. Nice video, thanks. Where is the link to those files (Github)?

[@remontlive]

How to place teardrope on a two curved traces? m?)

[@proactive_studio]

how do you add teardrops in circuitstudio? I know automatic teardropping is not an included feature, but how do you do it manually

[@Zachariah-Peterson]

I don't use circuitstudio regularly, but I think the way to do it would be to draw it out on a copper layer as a polygon or fill, and then copy that to other vias as needed. If you use mostly the same via size everywhere in the board then this should be an easy exercise. I think the only difficulty would be repeatedly setting net names across those copper fills.

[@saeidesekhavati1518]

😍😍😍

[@iPatroni]

T junction teardrops are problematic, on the same track some work some don't. Frustrating!

[@gooo6807]

Yep, same issue here.