PCB design can be a minefield of conflicting requirements. High-speed logic, dense packaging technologies, and large-scale programmable devices place extreme demands on the PCB designer. All physical design constraints, such as track clearances, path lengths, and trace widths need to be carefully monitored and controlled to produce a successful board design.
Altium Designer’s powerful rules-driven design, layout and editing environment gives you full control over all aspects of the physical implementation of your circuit. The system helps you create boards that are correct by design, and ensures the integrity of design data and compliance with all design constraints at every stage of the design process from capture through to board production.
With Altium Designer, we’ve placed the focus on the intelligent automation of critical design processes. Altium Designer peels away the design complexity and allows you to easily navigate and manipulate your design data. And the unified nature of Altium Designer provides a seamless design environment that encompasses the board design and all other aspects of the design process in a single application.
Full constraints-driven design
Being able to effectively define and apply physical constraints to the board layout is crucial to achieving high production yields.
Altium Designer provides a comprehensive set of design rules that cover all aspects of the board design process. From electrical and routing constraints through to signal integrity, Altium Designer’s hierarchical rules system provides the power and flexibility to completely control all crucial parameters in the design.
Precise design rule scoping
Instead of a set of fixed, pre-defined rule scopes, Altium Designer features a flexible query system to define the objects that a rule is applied to. This gives precise control over rule targeting, and makes the process of constraining your design fast and efficient.
You can also define multiple rules of the same type targeted to different sets of objects, providing hierarchical constraint definition. To know where rules are applied you can navigate through the defined rules and have Altium Designer highlight the objects targeted, or simply right-click on an object to find out exactly which rules are applicable to it.
Maintaining the accuracy of source schematics
PCB re-spins cost time and money, so finding design errors early is essential. Altium Designer introduces the concept of project compilation to the capture process to ensure the integrity and consistency of the source files within a project.
At any time in the design process you can compile your schematic project, which is also automatically compiled before any critical design actions. In this way the system ensures that you are alerted to errors and potential design problems as you design. With Altium Designer you can capture your application with the confidence that your projects will be correct by design, and that the integrity of your source files is constantly maintained throughout the design process.
Complete design synchronization
Altium Designer’s unified environment supports full and automatic synchronization of your entire board project, and allows you to efficiently manage the flow of changes between the PCB design and the source schematics.
Synchronization is bi-directional, so you can manage changes made at both the schematic and PCB level within a single operation. You have full control over the direction in which changes are propagated, and you can fully document any changes by generating engineering change order reports during synchronization.
Navigating design data
Altium Designer brings clarity to design navigation with a variety of innovative ways to filter, display and edit your design data.
You can interactively browse through components, nets or violations within schematic or PCB documents, and drill down through the hierarchy to highlight the individual primitives associated with objects. With Altium Designer your cursor becomes an interactive data mining tool. As you hover the cursor within the PCB design, essential information is displayed about the underlying objects.