Altium Designer 6.0 saw the addition of Smart Dragging – a powerful feature for easily moving existing track segments while maintaining the correct angles to connected segments. Smart Drag also incorporated a simple yet elegant feature for extending an unconnected track end – dragging on the end vertex adds a new segment, correctly angled away from the existing segment.

This Smart Drag capability has been substantially improved in Altium Designer 6.3 by the addition of support for multiple tracks. This allows a group of tracks to be selected and then extended as a single entity. You can use successive drags to continue to add new segments.

Taking the Smart Drag concept a step closer to becoming a bus routing tool is the new Place » Multiple Traces command. Using this command you can start with an unrouted component and effectively pull the routing out of the selected component pads. The multiple traces are then automatically gathered together, as shown in Figure 3. Simply move the cursor around as you place the multiple traces to explore various gather options. These multi-trace capabilities from pads or track ends represents the first stage in the development of a Bus Routing strategy.

Keep the following tips in mind when working with the Multiple Traces command:

• Rather than selecting component pads one by one, hold the Ctrl key as you click and drag a rectangle to select. Holding Ctrl limits the selection to the pad objects only, rather than selecting the parent component. This also works with the Select Touching Line and Select Touching Rectangle commands.
• Press the Tab key to open the Bus Routing dialog, where you set the Bus Spacing (track center to track center separation).
• Alternatively, use the , (comma) and . (full stop) shortcuts to interactively decrement and increment the bus spacing, in steps of the current snap grid.
• Press the \ (Backslash) to change the end alignment (once the first set of segments has been placed).
• Press the ~ (Tilda) key for a list of interactive shortcuts.