Having two or more designers working on the layout and routing of same board at the same time is an intriguing time-saving prospect. But how do you stop them treading on each others traces?
There are a few systems around that purport to allow collaborative PCB design, but to date they either rely on pre-segmenting the board area and restricting each designer to their designated space, or they require the large and expensive infrastructure and design tool investment that make most CFOs quiver in their boots.
Common wisdom suggests that real collaborative PCB design is just too hard and too expensive for most PCB designers. With a new release of Altium Designer on the way, we’re challenging that conventional wisdom by putting practical and effective board design collaboration into the design environment.
Data management points the way
We’ve been doing a lot of work in the data management area over recent releases, and in particular we’ve been bringing more version control capabilities inside the design editing environment. We’ve created a visual differencing system that lets designers see for themselves exactly what has changed between revisions of a PCB document.
In the upcoming release, we’ve combined this with an automated notification system that broadcasts over a network in real time information about edited regions of the PCB to all team members running Altium Designer. Everyone that has a version of the PCB document open can see what all the others are doing at any given time.
The changes made to each locally stored copy of the PCB document can then be selectively accepted or rejected and merged into a master copy of the design within the version control framework.
Collaborative design without the costs
The big advantage of the way we’ve implemented this is that it requires no additional infrastructure - it runs over a standard computer network - and no centralized server technology to manage the process. Simply turn the feature on in Altium Designer and you’re up and running. The new release of Altium Designer includes the popular open source Subversion version control system as part of its installation, so you don’t even need to worry about acquiring and installing a versioning system if you don’t already have one.
In use the system couldn’t be more
intuitive to use. As you work on the PCB, the areas you modify are broadcast
and highlighted with a colored overlay in all other instances of Altium
Designer running that PCB document. And as others make changes, you’ll see
their edits in your workspace. Everyone is free to make any edits they want,
even in areas changed by someone else, because everyone is working on a locally
checked out version of the head revision stored in the version control
repository. When it’s time to merge your changes into the main development
branch, the visual differencing and merging capabilities in Altium Designer
give you absolute control over the changes you want to accept and reject.
The beauty of this system is that works well for small teams with just a couple of designers, right up to large enterprises. It’s lightweight yet scalable. And most importantly, it doesn’t require huge IT overheads to implement and manage. From a design collaboration point of view, it lets you have several people all working in parallel on different parts of the one design file, and you can selectively bring each designer’s changes into a master document that represents the combined efforts of the entire team.
Altium’s PCB collaboration solution is built on the principles of version control so you get all the data integrity benefits of a centralized repository, but you also get the flexibility of being able to work locally without effecting what other team members might be doing. This lets you easily combine the forces of multiple designers to get boards designed, laid out and routed in the fastest possible time.
To see the new collaborative PCB design features in action, have a look at the 10 minute True PCB Design Collaboration video on our See what's coming in Release 10 preview pages.
