Altium Designer: Winter 09

New Altium Designer release The winter 09 release of Altium Designer brings significant new and enhanced features to unify the design process, helping you create a real return on your innovation. It’s the next phase in Altium’s commitment to update our solution every six months, and to continuallly introduce the features you need to create next-generation designs.

Not only will you deliver more innovation in less time, but you can also explore design possibilities with a freedom unmatched by any other design system. This new release focuses on streamlining design flows, simplifying data management, enabling rapid prototyping and concept exploration, and promoting better team collaboration - all intended to help you get your product to market faster.

Check out the winter 09 release preview videos…

Powerful new Interactive Routing features

Interactive routing is the single most time-consuming activity for board designers. The latest release of Altium Designer includes a range of enhancements to increase the user experience and productivity in this area.

Performance and efficiency upgrade to PCB graphics system

A significant effort has been put into re-engineering the DirectX graphics engine for PCB environment in the winter 09 release of Altium Designer. This has resulted in greatly improved performance with lower memory overhead and enabled some significant new features.

Field Instrument Dashboard using FPGA-based soft instruments

FPGA-based soft instruments are a powerful way of embedding debug tools inside FPGAs. In the summer 08 release of Altium Designer we extended this to allow custom instruments to be created and programmed into FPGAs for any purpose. With the winter 09 release of Altium Designer we are extending this even further, and providing a customized Instrument Dashboard specifically designed to allow viewing of custom controls.

Real-time Manufacturing Rule Checking

New rules have been added at the PCB layout stage to improve overall system productivity. A range of constraints can now be checked in real-time during the design process and before the fabrication of files, helping you avoid unnecessary design respins and getting to market faster.

Full Stackup Definition available for vias

As manufacturing technology improves and allows higher trace density, it’s become increasingly important to allow land sizes to be set independently for each signal layer. It’s now possible in Altium Designer to define via stack-ups that have varying sizes of round via shapes and on any of the signal layers specifically for this design scenario.

Design Release Management

Managing the process of releasing a design for prototype or production is a key aspect of the product development process and an important part of the overall enterprise data management function. This latest software release provides the first formal modeling of this concept within Altium Designer, as well as a list of enhancements aimed at increasing the release process efficiency.

Plug-n-Play Software Platform Builder

The Software Platform is a layer of software assembled in the Software Platform Builder from a range of provided components. It allows applications to exploit the hardware through a standardized set of services, such as storage services and network services. The Software Platform is easy to assemble, and provides a powerful range of functionality to your application code with just a few clicks of the mouse.

Live Links to Supplier Data

Suppliers’ data is now readily available through web services. As result, the integration of the available live data within the design process (at the library design level, during the design, and at design release time) becomes possible. This feature allows you to search suppliers’ databases (for example Digi-Key) from within Altium Designer, and link library parts to matching supplier items. Using this link, the supplier data relative to linked parts can be retrieved at any time during the design process or at design release time, in a Bill Of Materials.

Cadstar Importer

The CADSTAR importer has been added to the winter 09 release of Altium Designer to assist users translating CADSTAR design and library files to Altium Designer format.