As you move from capture through to board layout and routing, Altium Designer supports the propagation of the hierarchical structure of the project. The system preserves the functional partitioning of the design into the physical realm, and makes it easy to scope physical constraints to drive the layout and routing process.
You can automatically generate component and net classes based on the schematic sheet hierarchy, which you can then use within the PCB editor to create targeted design rules. Schematic structure can also be used to drive the creation of component placement rooms, preserving the logical structure defined within the source files.
Altium Designer’s fully unified schematic capture and PCB design environment allows design intent to be preserved and propagated as you move from the conceptual to the physical phase of the board design. This smoothes the transition between capture and layout, and provides a truly unified design platform.
Complete interactive routing system
A large portion of the board design effort is spent on routing the connections. As board real estate shrinks and component and pin densities increase, the routing challenge becomes tougher. You need to be able to squeeze the most from every square millimeter of routing space.
Altium Designer provides you with a complete interactive routing solution that combines rules-driven, versatile interactive routing modes, predictive track placement and dynamically optimized connectivity to allow you to efficiently tackle any routing challenge.
Versatile routing modes
In tight spots you can simply hug existing tracks and Altium Designer will enforce the defined clearance constraints, preventing you from creating rule violations. You can also switch modes and Altium Designer will push existing tracks out of the way, under full design rule compliance, to make room. To re-route a track simply route the new path and Altium Designer will automatically remove redundant copper, making design rework fast and efficient.
To support routing to large BGA devices, Altium Designer includes an automatic BGA escape routing function that will fanout and place stub tracks on all used pins of the device to make connection paths accessible around the periphery of the component. The mix of interactive routing features in Altium Designer provides a complete and unified interactive routing environment that allows you to quickly and efficiently tackle any board routing challenge.
Autorouting support
Altium Designer comes equipped with Altium’s Situs Topological Autorouter engine, which is unified at a platform level with the PCB editor. The Situs engine uses topological analysis to map the board space. Topological mapping provides greater flexibility in route path determination and allows non-orthogonal routing corridors to be more efficiently exploited.
Altium Designer also includes full bi-directional support for the SPECCTRA autorouter. During export you can automatically preserve existing board routing, control the mapping of Altium Designer via rules to SPECCTRA pad stacks, and propagate net classes to SPECCTRA to allow efficient generation of class-based routing constraints.