As electronic systems increasingly permeate today’s products, managing and integrating that part of the process has become crucial to market success. In particular, managing the process of releasing a design for prototype or production is the cornerstone of managing electronics design at a company level.
It also represents the most obvious intersecting point between the electronics design team and the broader lifecycle development (produce-track-service, and so on) of the electronic project. In practice, the design data generated by the electronics design team must ultimately be released to drive the manufacture of products.
The underlying core, and advantage, of Altium Designer is that all of the electronic design processes exist in one unified environment and access a single collection of coherent design data. This allows the design release process to take an accurate snapshot of the design data at any time and create a ‘release package’.
Design Release Manager
For a given configuration of a design, Altium Designer’s Release Manager may generate a release package that includes 3D renders of PCB projects, Gerber files for board-fabrication, BOMs for Assembly, firmware files and Smart PDF documents for service personnel. The source files and generated outputs are both included in the release package, which provides a high level of integrity for the release.
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A snapshot of the working folder and project dependencies |
The Release Manager also provides a clear vision of the project's history, as well as the dependencies throughout the release. Designers can identify the moment in time at which the design was released, and go back to this point, retrieve, modify and re-release the design with updated or corrected dependencies.
With this approach, the key link between the electronics design process and the rest of the world (company systems and beyond), is the identity of that release package. In practice a release is given a unique name, for example; Version 1.6, and this appears in Altium Designer’s history view along with a designer’s local changes and the team changes from the version control system.
Combined with the Output Job Editor, the Version Control Revision system and the ability to link to Supplier Data, the Release Manager is a powerful tool. It helps you to streamline the product development process and get release data management under control.
Conceive-design-produce-service
Formalized, named design releases provide a foundation for the wider organization to interface successfully with the electronics design process. For the rest of the organization the released data is their primary view of the electronics design space.
So if your team is still relying on a sequential and complex system of manual checks and approvals to release a product to manufacture and the rest of the world, it may be time to take a look at the data management features built into Altium Designer. The design Release Manager is just one of the many data management capabilities that will help you get more successful designs to market in less time. Stay tuned for more.
Formalized release of design data brings predictability and integrity to outputs for production and release.
- Watch the design release management video
- Find out more about Supplier Data linking
- Find out more about the Output Job editor
