Consolidating on the numerous productivity and performance features introduced in Altium Designer 6.3, the latest releases of Altium Designer deliver over 190 improvements while enhancing platform stability.
Altium Designer provides electronic designers and engineers with a single, unified application that incorporates all the technologies and capabilities necessary for complete electronic product development. The latest releases strengthen the unique productivity advantages of Altium Designer by offering expanded programmable device support along with new features and a host of refinements to Altium’s innovative Hardware Accelerated Graphics Engine.
Graphics performance now up to 80X faster
Harnessing the full potential of the latest-generation DirectX® graphics cards, Altium Designer’s Hardware Accelerated Graphics Engine offers a core performance improvement in screen panning and redraws, improving productivity and enhancing the user experience. Altium Designer 6.4 has delivered substantial improvements in the behaviour and performance of the new DirectX graphics system. As a result of this refinement users are typically seeing graphics performance gains of up to 60X, with panning and zoom times accelerated by up to 40X and 80X respectively.
You can read more about the Altium Designer Hardware Accelerated Graphics Engine and see a demonstration video here.
Altium Designer 6.4 has also introduced a new favourite via system allowing the quick selection of the current routing via from user-defined favourites. Similar to Altium Designer’s existing favourite tracks width feature, the new favourite via system enhances interactive routing and increases productivity. Further efficiency gains have been introduced through improvements to the STEP file exporter, which now uses object replication to generate significantly smaller files that load faster in MCAD applications.
The latest releases also deliver expanded hardware device support including the ability to work with the LATTICE® MachXO family of PLDs plus generic ARM 7 devices that adheres to ARM’s JTAG scan chain recommendations. The most recent release, Altium Designer 6.5, builds on this capability with improvements to pin swapping, generic device support and the IPC Footprint Wizard.
These are just some of the enhancements delivered by the new Altium Designer releases. To read the release notes or learn more about the new capabilities and productivity benefits offered in Altium Designer and to look at the complete list of Altium Designer updates including 6.4 and 6.5, see the Altium Designer overview.
Read about the new Altium Designer 6 Viewer Edition – free to Altium Designer 6 license holders