Altium Designer

Altium Designer's computer-aided electronics design system is designed to replace its predecessor, the common CAD one under the brand name. P-CAD Although many P-CAD features have been ported to Altium Designer. The system is a comprehensive solution that allows, within the framework of a single data model, to develop electronic devices in all three aspects: printed circuit boards, programmable hardware and software. In the same application, you can develop schematic diagrams, design printed circuit boards and create prototypes of future devices. Specialists from different departments can work on one project. As a result, engineers are able to focus on the intelligent component of the product, on the perfection of its electronic filling, which largely determines the competitive advantages of the products.

2022: PLM component for Appius' Altium Designer

A specialized component of the integration system Appius-PLM Product Lifecycle Management enables instrument-making enterprises, when using Altium Designer's computer-aided design system, to set up end-to-end project exchange data and organize safe a single one for storage interaction between designers and developers. This was announced Appius by the company on July 26, 2022. More. here

2019

Altium Designer 20

On October 28, 2019, Altium Limited announced an updated version of Altium Designer, a software chosen by PCB development and design professionals.

According to the developer, with the help of Altium Designer 20, designing individually or working as a team, users can create electronic devices without restrictions - simple and complex boards, single and multi-board devices, low and high-frequency designs, from working out the device circuit to designing the board and forming the composition of the product. With one tool, users can create circuit diagrams and PCB designs, simulate circuit functioning, select electronic components from different manufacturers, and generate documentation for their designs for production.

According to the developer's statement, Altium Designer 20 includes:

• Interactive tracing - Push & Shove allows you to design complex boards with high interconnect density (HDI) and accelerate design time by more than 20%, even for simple printed circuit boards.
• Fast PCB Tracing Capabilities - Updated tracing enables efficient design of high-speed cards using DDR3/4/5, 100 Gb Ethernet and SerDes PCIe 4.0/5.0.
• Multi-Board Design Tools - The release for Multi-board projects uses ActiveBOM capabilities, including sourcing, product rule validation, and component selection options. Users can also export 3D PDF files for Multi-board assemblies, allowing employees to view 3D assemblies.
• Power device design capabilities - for applications where high-voltage device design is critical (e.g., spacecraft, aircraft, and high-tech lasers). Altium Designer 20 offers design rules that help maintain gaps between high-voltage circuits on the surface of printed circuit boards to prevent the occurrence of an electric arc in power supply systems and in the design of mixed-type devices.
• Dynamically compiling design data from the Altium Designer schema, design, product composition, design documentation, and other elements of a single model improves user productivity.
• Altium Designer 20 contains more than 200 improvements offered by users.

Altium Designer 20 will be available to customers in the fourth quarter of 2019.

Altium Designer 19.1 и Altium 365 Viewer

On July 16, 2019, Altium Limited, a developer in the field of electronic device design automation, announced the release of Altium Designer 19.1 and Altium 365 Viewer, a free online tool that allows you to view Altium Designer projects in a web browser.

Altium is focused on building funds for the electronics development industry. Altium Designer 19.1 and Altium 365 Viewer streamline PCB design,

The updated version of Altium Designer 19.1 improves the stability and performance of the product, reduces the number of errors that occur and increases the time for effective design. Many innovations were implemented based on user suggestions on the Altium BugCrunch forum. Altium Designer 19.1 is based on improvements in the stability of previous versions, and this version reflects the increasing contribution of the company's resources to fixing errors and implementing ideas received from users. Altium continues to urge users to leave their feedback on the Altium BugCrunch forum.

In addition to improving stability and performance in Altium Designer 19.1, Altium has also released the Altium 365 Viewer, a tool that makes it easier to view Altium Designer project files. You previously needed an Altium Designer license or a classic viewer license to view projects. Altium 365 Viewer offers an easier way to visualize diagrams, 2D- and 3D boards and product composition directly in a web browser by simply dragging and dropping files with the mouse without having to install any other software. Additionally, once the project is loaded, Altium 365 Viewer will automatically associate the product composition with the dynamic supply chain information provided by Octopart.

The Altium 365 Viewer also allows a community of electronics developers and designers to look into the Altium 365. The Altium 365 cloud platform, which is in beta testing, provides easy interaction throughout the electronic product development process, from design to manufacturing,

2018: Altium Designer 19 with geometric core C3D

On December 19, 2018, Altium announced the release of Altium Designer 19, an updated version of PCB design software. The updated functionality makes the design of complex high-quality projects easier, faster and more accurate at all stages: from concept to production.

According to the company, Altium Designer 19 complements the previous version with design technologies that simplify the process of creating projects and ensure the unification of the formation of diagrams, structures and outputs.

In particular, Altium Designer 19 received advanced 3D functionality created by the C3D Toolkit tools from the Russian company C3D Labs. In total, there are three key components of the C3D Toolkit in the CAD of printed circuit boards: the geometric core of the C3D Modeler, the C3D Solver parametric solver and the C3D Converter exchange module.

As a result of the use of C3D Toolkit in the Multi-Board Design tools of Altium Designer 19, functionality characteristic of mechanical CAD has appeared: support for flexible-hard boards, pairing operations, exporting data to popular MCAD formats. Components from C3D Labs provided high accuracy and speed of geometric constructions, the developers noted.

Support for flexible hard boards is based on the C3D Modeler geometric core sheet modeling module. C3D Solver parametric solver algorithms are the basis for conjugations. The Converter C3D exchange module is responsible for transferring data to STEP and Parasolid X_T formats.

Components from C3D Labs are also involved in the development of Altium Nexus, a joint PCB design solution.

Altium Designer 19 has improved performance and reliability compared to previous versions. This was achieved with powerful, simple and modern PCB design tools. Altium Designer 19 users will also be able to access easy integrated synchronization for all design participants through seamless communication with Altium 365. Sergey Kostinsky, CTO of Altium

Altium Designer 19 uses electronics design automation technologies, focusing on improving user experience. The next possibilities allow you to model the structures of high-density interconnections for the manufacture of modern boards. With the Material Library, developers can specify precise impedance profiles for routing and manufacturing. An optimized component panel and search allows you to find and place components in a project, even if they are not already in the library, by automatically retrieving supply chain and CAD model data.

All Altium Designer licenses include one year of Altium Subscription with access to Altium 365 , a cloud-based platform for engineering collaboration in electronics design. Altium 365 provides seamless access from Altium Designer or a web browser to a single, multi-specialty design environment for data synchronization, up-to-date information, and product manufacturability.

2017

Altium Designer 18

On December 18, 2018, Altium Limited announced the release of the Altium Designer 18 version.

The version adds support for 64-bit architecture and multithreaded code execution. Altium Designer 18 with optimized performance and improved features provides engineers with a solution for designing complex printed circuit boards.

Altium Designer 18 has updated the ActiveRoute algorithms, which allows you to adjust the conductor length and calculate the equivalent pin replacement. The ACTIVEBOM editor also received a number of changes, including tools for checking each BOM element.

Software capabilities allow you to model multi-module designs and control inter-module electrical detachable connections in real time.

Users with an active subscription can upgrade to Altium Designer 18 for free.

SolidWorks End-to-End Integration Technology

The group of companies SWR on November 29, 2017 announced the development of end-to-end integration technology SolidWorks and Altium Designer within the framework of the concept PLM in accordance with the terms of the contract concluded with the company. Altium Limited

The solution provides end-to-end product development management in a single enterprise information space, which implements component identification when working in the context of MCAD-ECAD. Read more here.

Altium Designer 17.1

In June 2017, Altium announced the release of Altium Designer 17.1, an updated PCB design solution specifically designed for today's engineers. The industry's demands for even more sophisticated, integrated electronic devices are forcing designers to constantly improve their efficiency and apply innovative solutions to their work. The Altium Designer 17.1 platform is aimed at solving such urgent problems and offers engineers a complete set of tools to optimize the design process.

Modern design experts are tasked not only with speeding up the development process, but also with expanding the functionality of the device, as well as increasing the level of their interaction. Altium Designer 17.1, an updated system for designing electronics, combines thoughtful complex tools and functions that allow you to solve problems related to complicating the design features of devices and reducing their size, as well as meet all the requirements of solutions within the framework of the "Internet of Things" concept.

In addition to fixed bugs and improved performance, the new version contains an improved tracing solution, an updated design rule checking system, advanced document editor functionality, and much more.

The updated version allows you to do without manual rerouting and save time, thanks to the ability to limit the routing area by layers, objects or chains. Altium Designer 17.1 provides complete control over the placement of topology objects based on PCB region rules, as well as improved data accuracy due to limited trace regions in imported files.

Users now have the ability to improve the accuracy of object measurements with an optimized workflow. The advanced Draftsman module simplifies the process of adding new dimensions to objects on the board, thereby increasing the efficiency of the petitioning process. In addition, improvements have been made to the Draftsman drawing editor's program code to help increase its performance.

In this version, it became possible to selectively cancel violations of Design Rule Check (DRC) rules, exclude them from the general list if the user is confident in his decision. With this feature, you can register non-violation information to move a work project to Altium Vault, as well as make any changes, without the risk of disabling DRC by all rules.

2016

Altium Designer 17

On November 17, 2016, Altium Limited announced the release of version 17 of Altium Designer's flagship PCB design software.

The release of the Altium Designer 17 update is designed to continue the company's course and shift its focus to what is most important for engineers - direct electronics development. Altium Designer is designed for professionals and we intend to help our customers retain the valuable inspiration they need to build electronics. We automated as many processes as possible and allowed designers to focus on developing unique ideas to meet their challenges. Henry Potts, COO of Altium Limited

Altium Designer 17 will help specialists fully immerse themselves in design through ActiveRoute technology. It helps to solve the problem of tracing the entire fee in a few minutes in order to concentrate on improving the development and realization of creative potential. The Draftsman Automated Drawing Module will help engineers focus more on the innovative component in development, enabling them to accurately communicate design intent. Altium Designer 17 eliminates the tedious routine that distracts users from the design process and allows you to implement original ideas, create more advanced devices.

PCB developers still spend a lot of time on interactive tracing. With ActiveRoute, we take trace technology to the next level, giving the user complete control and flexibility for high-quality tasks in significantly less time. Charles Pfeil, Senior Product Manager at Altium Limited

The functionality in Altium Designer 17 is available as a free update for all subscribers.

Altium Designer 16.1

Linking design and documentation processes together.

While engineering documentation preparation is the most important step following the design process, engineers often find themselves in a difficult situation of forced use of third-party software to prepare technical documentation, which does not fully take into account the peculiarities of the original design data. Using Draftsman in Altium Designer 16.1, engineers can easily create and modify documentation without leaving the primary design environment. Draftsman allows developers to:

• Maintain efficiency by creating and updating assembly documents without the need to master new software or process.
• Simplify communication with the manufacturer using convenient drawing tools without leaving the familiar design interface.
• Provide a greater level of detail in board diagrams, with detailed images, configurable wiring display, and direct access to project elements.

"The preparation of technical documentation has always been one of those boring, but nevertheless necessary tasks that any engineer faced after the completion of the main design process," comments Alexey Sabunin, technical product manager at Altium. "With Draftsman, we managed to go beyond the limitations that the traditional documentation process imposed on us and link the data of the development and documentation processes into a single whole, allowing engineers to focus on communicating all the details of the project to the manufacturer on the first attempt."

In addition to Draftsman, Altium Designer 16.1 also includes several new features that are designed to improve the efficiency of the development process itself and allow engineers to quickly complete the development process:

• Accurate 3D measurements - Tools for measuring the distances between 3D models and their parts are implemented on the PCB.
• USB 3.0 Support - Engineers can easily and quickly develop accurate board templates that take into account the latest USB 3.0 technology requirements.
• Software enhancements - With individual UI enhancements and overall development platform stability, engineers can be confident that the entire development process will be successful.

От P-CAD 200x к Altium Designer

On September 29, 2016, Altium Limited announced the launch of a special proposal for the transition to Altium Designer with P-CAD 200x.

As part of Altium Designer, the module for importing projects performed on third-party systems, including from P-CAD ^[1]. Translating existing projects into the Altium Designer format will save time on the system implementation and reduce the time for the development of electronic products, both in small private enterprises and within the framework of large project holdings. After importing P-CAD libraries, you can start developing projects in the Altium Designer environment immediately. It is necessary to perform measures to verify the received data, and in the event of "artifacts," correct the results using Altium Designer. This is due to the fact that systems differ, including the structure of data storage.

As part of the current subscription to the software product, all users will have access to the version of Altium Designer 17, its release is scheduled for November 2016. The emphasis in it is on the development of the functionality of tracing printed circuit boards.

We always strive to meet our users and offer the most effective solutions in the field of PCB design. This is why we decided to offer users the opportunity to switch to Altium Designer with P-CAD on special terms. We hope that thanks to this offer, users will be able to appreciate all the advantages of one of the most advanced solutions in the field of CAD electronics, without overpaying for a system change. Oleg Ilyukin, Senior Territorial Manager of Altium Limited for Russia and CIS]]

2015

Altium Designer 16 Upgrade

On November 16, 2015, Altium Limited announced the release of the Altium Designer 16 update.

According to the developers, the version will expand the Altium Designer platform and will include a number of functions that will increase the performance of the design process itself, help to reach a higher level of automation. Altium Designer 16 is offered as a free update for all customers with a valid Altium Subscription. The distribution is available for download on the official website of Altium Products Download page.

Altium Designer 16 includes a number of features that will allow users to solve more complex tasks in less time:

• Color synchronization of circuits allows you to color the circuits of various electrical interfaces for easy and fast reading of the circuit and PCB.
• The optimized Design Rule Editor enables you to create rules and manage priorities among yourself with improved sets of design rule queries.
• The 3D STEP Model Generation Wizard helps you create the most realistic 3D models of electronic components of the IPC standard.

Altium Designer 16

On September 16, 2015, Altium Limited, a developer in electronic device design automation, announced a major upgrade to its flagship Altium Designer 16 PCB design product.

• A system for selecting alternative components, allowing developers to fully control the list of electronic components taking into account the set of their permissible substitutions for assembly production.
• Visual alignment boundaries that will allow designers to define the limitations of their routing solutions in real time with visualization of placement boundaries between objects on the board.
• A component placement system that enables designers to create the most systematic and efficient board layouts with new component placement options.

"The emergence of new capabilities in Altium Designer 16 reflects a commitment to the company's values and will contribute to the growth of the Altium Designer platform as a whole," says Sergey Kostinsky, vice president of development at Altium Limited. - This update will help achieve our goal of creating the best PCB design tool that meets the reduction requirements

2014

Altium Designer 15

Altium Designer 15 continues the direction outlined in the previous version and is aimed at improving board development performance, supporting modern electronics technologies, as well as board production technologies. For example, a new Pin Pair object will appear in the PCB Editor to describe the rules for aligning T-chains. To transfer data for production in the new version of the program, it will be possible to use modern data exchange standards.

Pin Pair for High Speed Signals

In most high-speed interfaces, you need to align branches within one circuit. To simplify such a task, a new "Pin Pair" object has been introduced that defines the section of the circuit between the two leads. Such parcels can be grouped and subsequently used to describe design rules such as length constraints and alignment accuracy.

Support for IPC-2581 and Gerber X2 standards

The often used format for the production of RS-274D printed circuit boards, better known as Gerber, was released more than 35 years ago and has long been considered obsolete by many manufacturers. Ucamco has updated the latest version of this RS-274X format to Gerber X2, which included data important for production, regulated by the IPC-2581 standard. Now, when transferring data for production, a more advanced board information is stored in a single file, which contains information about complex board stacks, about flexible and rigid parts of the board, about materials, etc.

Altium Designer 15 supports IPC-2581 and Gerber X2 formats, while users have the ability to configure file output for production in both new and old formats with the maximum set of settings.

Altium Designer Update 14.3

On June 9, 2014, Altium Ltd announced the release of the Altium Designer 14.3 program update, which added 35 additional features and made about 150 changes and fixes.

Among the new opportunities:

• Edit polygons. The work with landfills has been greatly changed. Now you do not need to use separate tools to edit the geometry of the polygon - you just need to select the polygon and move its vertices. Moreover, vertices can be moved in three modes: arbitrary direction, round and chamfer. This feature allows you to create regions with complex geometry.

• Alignment of conductor length. A special object has been added to the current tool for length alignment - the result of the Interactive Length Tuning tool. Through it, it is possible to edit and delete the "accordion" with which the length of the conductor on the board is aligned.

• Topology shielding. On the board, you can select any part of the topology (track, polygon, differential pair) and use the Via Shelding tool to form an array of transition holes along the contour of the selected topology. This feature is most relevant for boards that implement microwave path fragments that require mandatory shielding from other portions of the board.

Added the ability to remove unused pads on internal layers of the contact pads (Remove Unused Pad), extended Teardrop settings, added new (Pad Entry) and changed existing (Clearance) design rules.

A full list of additions is available on the Russian-language Altium Wiki portal.

The Text Document Generation Plugin will contain three basic templates for the specification, item list, and purchase list. All templates will be completely open for editing the graphical part of the stamp and are flexibly configurable in terms of reporting order. Users will be able to specify any level of component groupings, partition names, fonts, and other settings. For the BOM, you can create additional sections, such as Assembly Units, Parts, and more. The templates are planned to support multivariable projects (versions), functional groups and other features in accordance with GOST 2.106-1996 and GOST 2.701-2008 standards.

Altium Designer 14.3

On April 15, 2014, the Australian company Altium Ltd. introduced a new version of Altium Designer 14.3.

The program is scheduled for release in May 2014. It was presented as part of the seminar "Improving the efficiency of PCB development in the new version of Altium Designer 14.3."

According to the developers, the Altium Designer 14.3 version should be of interest to Russian users, most of whom use outdated P-CAD software for electronics development. The new version of the program focuses on interface adaptation and techniques for users who switch to Altium Designer from other systems and cannot immediately "get used to" the new program. In many cases, alternative methods more familiar to P-CAD users have been added to perform pre-existing procedures.

The most important version additions are:

• editing polygons;
• Select single objects in the Board Editor
• Filter panel to restrict the selection and display of objects;
• Working with design rules.

Altium Designer 14.2

On February 26, 2014, Altium announced the release of Altium Designer 14.2, aimed at fixing bugs and flaws, improving the stability and performance of the program. The release includes about 100 fixes/improvements.

The most significant adjustments are:

• Increase in the rate of "overfilling" of polygons. Testing of work with landfills was carried out on large projects and the speed of "re-filling" in some cases increased 20 ^[2]
• Advanced Drill Table tool settings. You can now customize the hole table in more detail, with individual parameters for each section of the table.
• Improved indication of disabled DRC rules. The Design Rules Rule Setup window improves the table functionality.
• The capabilities of the diagram editor to comply with national standards (GOST) have been expanded. They became available for changing the property of special characters of component leads (previously they were zero thickness and could not be printed). A new line type "Dash Dotted" has been added.
• Improved support for vector graphics in the schema editor.
• Improved support for global bookmarks in SmartPDF.
• Improved support for Subversion 1.8 and the use of various languages ​ ​ in SVN.

2013

Altium Designer 2013

Altium Designer 2013 contains a large number of additions related to the adaptation of the program to the GOST requirements for the execution of documentation for electrical schematic diagrams. A number of program settings, which were previously available only for system changes, are now available to the user. For example, component pin fonts, ports, position of output labels, port sizes.

Preview project documents. You can organize project files into Workspaces for ease of use. In the new version of Altium Designer 2013, the workgroup has a graphical display as a separate page (View > Workspace, CTRL + 'hot key). The Workspace page displays previews of all documents that are part of the current project, and groups the documents by type.

Transparency settings for Board Editor layers and objects. For ease of use in the board editor, it is often necessary not to display some objects and the most loaded layers. To do this, in the View Configuration settings, in the Transparently section, you can now specify individual transparency settings for all primitives on each layer of the board.

Custom Hole Chart. This table will be available in one of the next updates to Altium Designer 2013. The data in it will be displayed not only when printing (as before), but also when viewing the board in the PCB editor. To add a table to a drawing sheet, you use a special Drill Table command that has additional properties. Among them: fonts of inscriptions, a list of displayed graphs (and their names), conditional images of holes and a format for filling the table.

Custom Pin Box Settings. Altium Designer 2013 solved some issues on which the diagram editor contradicted the requirements of GOST. One of them is the ability to customize text boxes related to the outputs of the component in the diagram. Now you can edit both the font of the text box data and its position on the Stage relative to the output itself. It also remains possible to set these parameters globally, at the level of the schema editor.

Controls the size and text for ports. Previously, the port size in the schema editor was not allowed for editing, and when changing the font for the output name, the inscription went beyond the port graphics. This item also did not allow to draw up the scheme in accordance with GOST. In Altium Designer 2013, both of these options are included in a number of custom port settings.

Also, significant additions include:

• Hyperlink is a new diagram editor tool that allows you to insert direct links to Internet sources on a diagram sheet;
• Smart PDF - now the PDF document stores information about the components of the project, which is displayed in the drop-down window when you hover over the schematic component;
• Clearance rule between silkscreen and masked cutouts - this rule can now be checked in "to exposed copper" or "to solder mask openings" mode;
• 3D mode controls - You can specify the view of the board in 3D mode by selecting Top, Bottom, Front, Back, Left, Right, Isometric.

Altium Designer 13.2

Now users have access to functions such as Design View and Drill Table, which can be attributed to the necessary tools of Russian engineers. Additions to Altium Designer 13.2 make it possible to design PCBs without third-party CAD.

The most interesting new features include:

• Hole chart. Allows you to add a table of used holes in the PCB Editor for subsequent drawing of the PCB;
• PCB types. Used to display scalable views of both the entire board (front or back) and individual areas with increased mounting density;
• ActiveBOM. A report on the components used, which is updated in real time. When using a template, this report can be presented in the form of a specification, list or list of purchased products;
• Special power and ground symbols. In the new version, land and power symbols are available in electrical diagrams in accordance with GOST standards;
• A new separator in the component symbol in the diagram. The last stumbling block does not allow drawing of the diagram according to GOST.

Many changes to the new version of Altium Designer 13.2 also affected work with the Altium Vault server, which is an application for centralized storage and management of information about projects and components developed in the design environment.

This update enhances the features that are registered in Vault. For example, there are options for storing component models in Vault Spice, as well as full-fledged functionality for managing these models as part of the component. The update also expanded the administrative management of work in Vault, both through the Altium Designer interface and through external web browsers.

The first six functions introduced in Altium Designer 16.2 specifically for Russian users are the ability to scale the views of individual product elements, a customizable hole table, the ability to set a separator mark for the digital numbering of multi-section components, a set of special symbols for the power and ground designation, the ability to customize fonts, parameters and orientation of text inscriptions in the diagram editor, as well as the ability to edit parameters and graphics of port designations. As Shikhov explained, without these functions it is quite difficult to form documentation that could pass standard control.

GOST support is part of the company's strategic initiative to adapt products to the requirements of Russian customers. Work is underway to integrate the online AltiumLive electronic component database with information sources from domestic component suppliers. AltiumDesigner is preparing a pairing with Compass machine-building CAD, as well as with the 1C accounting system.

2012: Altium Designer 12

In Altium Designer 12, Altium continues to develop successful concepts:

• Modification of the structure of the content delivery platform, which fundamentally changed the order in which the user receives new capabilities and software improvements.
• Offering advanced PCB design tools, powerful state-of-the-art project data and versioning management systems.
• Integrated access to a rapidly growing database of off-the-shelf projects and software updates online.

Thanks to this approach, users with Altium Subscription have already received 16 updates in the last year, containing improvements and additions to the capabilities of Altium Designer. With Altium Designer 12, Altium Subscription subscribers will be able to use the latest software delivery system. Unlike previous new versions, Altium Designer 12 will not contain a large number of changes and fundamentally new features, but will be delivered as part of a permanent update system. Thus, all improvements and fixes will be delivered to the user directly in the process of appearing as part of the subscription.

The delivery of updates to users is supported by a powerful cloud infrastructure. The Plug-In Manager, part of Altium Designer, gives users complete control over the installation of updates.

Altium Designer 12 has incorporated all system developments, improvements and expansions over the past year, of which it is worth noting:

• possibility of creating contact pads of non-standard shape with automatic formation of a protective mask;
• The ability to disable reporting of a rule violation (e.g., non-connected output) on a node while continuing to fully verify the remainder of the schema.
• algorithms underlying the calculation of track width take into account more physical parameters of the printed circuit board and provide a better result.

2010

Altium Designer 10

Since the release of the program, users have received 12 software updates that contain new features and bug fixes. For example, the latest update included a new feature, "No ERC Marker," which was proposed by a large number of users.

The most important change that appeared with the release of this update was the new procedure for accessing updates, which is now possible only with a valid subscription. Previously, updates for Altium Designer 10 could be obtained and installed without a subscription. Users using Standalone or Private Server licenses now need to reactivate their licenses and then access updates if they have a valid subscription.

In addition, Altium subscription users also benefit from ongoing software updates in the AltiumLive information portal:

• Bug Cruncher - a feedback system for users who want to take part in future updates;
• forums and blogs - a wide platform for communication;
• online technical support.

It is worth noting that during the released 12 updates, more than 25 updates to the content of the technical information base on the AltiumLive portal were available to users: information about components, including prices from suppliers, seats, templates for typical projects, development samples and much more.

Altium Designer 10 Integrated PCB and FPGA Electronic Design System

The main efforts of Altium developers were aimed at implementing a unified system for managing the base of projects and libraries at all stages of the product life cycle, as well as increasing the performance and stability of the system. The main additions to the new version of Altium Designer 10, which will undoubtedly be in demand among most developers, are:

• Full MS support OS Windows 7
• adding an SVN version control system that could be used in earlier versions of the program, but is now part of it, which saves the user from installing and configuring third-party solutions;
• the addition of Aldec's ActiveHDL simulation system, which significantly increases the speed and capabilities of FPGA modeling compared to earlier versions of the built-in simulator;
• Add the ability to customize the grid system and references in the PCB Editor, which greatly enhances the ability of the graphics editor to create complex design designs.
• extending the options and capabilities of the OUTJOB output settings file, which involves batch generation of a complete set of CDs and files for production in several steps and minimizes the possibility of error;
• introduction of a new Altium Designer installation and update system, which constantly monitors the appearance of updates for the program and allows the user to select the necessary modules for installation.

In addition, it is worth noting separately the launch of the new online resource AltiumLive, which is an "online ecosystem." This system is aimed at specialists in the field of electronic equipment design and is designed to ensure convenient interaction of designers with colleagues, suppliers, manufacturers and, in the future, with customers.

We can also highlight the new Altium Vaults technology, which can be used both through the AltiumLive WEB interface and through the Altium Designer program. This technology is designed to ensure the organization of a repository of projects and libraries, both for the entire developer community and within a single enterprise. With this technology, you can manage versions, project data, monitor component lifecycles, and analyze the use of components in different projects. At the same time, Vaults provides interaction with supply chains, providing users with up-to-date information about the availability of components used in projects. The information can be used by both designers and suppliers and manufacturers (currently this only applies to foreign suppliers and manufacturers).

In April 2011, technical specialists of NPP Rodnik released a new version of the library kit for a comprehensive program for the development of electronic devices based on printed circuit boards and Altium Designer FPGA. At the request of licensed users of the library kit for Altium Designer, about 500 new components were added to the database, including domestic microcircuits from the KR1533, 1533, 564 series, as well as other, including foreign, microcircuits most in demand at Russian enterprises. In addition to expanding the volume of libraries, a partial restructuring of the database was carried out, as part of which new data on library components were added and corrections were made. In particular, the names of the seats of domestic microcircuits were edited in accordance with GOST 17467-88, as well as foreign microcircuits in accordance with IPC standards. For domestic chips and semiconductors, the Analog field was added, which indicates a similar foreign-made component. The appearance of a description of analogues is the first step towards the inclusion of SPICE models of components in the library kit. Also a significant update in the new version was the addition of component descriptions (Datasheet), which are stored in the database and are available for viewing from component properties directly from the schema. The main advantage of libraries is a standardized approach to designing component parameters, which is adapted for a macro in Excel format, which allows you to get a specification and a list of elements from the Altium Designer project. Feature parameters can also be used to design text CDs in third-party systems and utilities that work with the BOM (Bill Of Materials) report. Together with this library suite, Altium Designer users are offered technical support, which includes the ability to replenish enterprise databases with new elements, as well as work on converting libraries from previously used design systems (P-CAD, OrCAD, and others).

Notes