What's new in Altium Designer Release 10
Unified design with smart data management
Moving from a seasonally-themed release naming to a simple numbering format, the latest release of Altium Designer – Altium Designer Release 10 – continues the process of keeping you plugged into a continuous stream of new features and technologies designed to make it easier for you to create your next generation electronics designs.
The arrival of Release 10 represents a major step in Altium Designer’s capabilities. It includes an impressive and comprehensive collection of new technologies aimed at not only revolutionizing the way in which you manage your design information, but also automating your design configuration and release processes.
This release of Altium Designer breaks new ground with powerful and exciting new technologies that will help even more companies improve productivity (up to 400%, for some Altium designer users), take control of their design data, and get projects manufactured as designed first time. Here are just some of the new capabilities and features in Release 10 of Altium Designer.
Design Data Management System
- Altium Designer's unified
platform – with a single unified data model representing the system being
designed – has been harnessed to tackle the problem of providing the
highest data integrity without compromising the freedom necessary for
design innovation. The result is the implementation of a Design Data
Management model that allows a formal definition of the links between the
design world and the supply chain that is ultimately responsible for
building the actual products.
It uses a model that maps the design data to specific production Items (blank and assembled boards) that the supply chain is actually going to build. With this model in place, and with a range of supporting features and technologies, the software enables you to pass data from the design domain to the production domain in a pain-free, automated fashion – generating high integrity data output with (literally) the click of a button.
To see this in action, watch the Smart Data Management and High-Integrity Releasesvideos.
Board design
- Collaborative PCB Design
Altium Designer Release 10 brings true collaboration to the PCB design process, where multiple designers can work on the same board at the same time, and bring their results together.
Through the new Collaborate, Compare and Merge panel you're informed about the status of your board, compared to your fellow collaborators. There’s a command to Show the Differences, and a Difference Map that provides a high-level view of who has done what on the board – you can keep your changes, or pull the changes made by others into your board.
There's even an Auto command that automatically integrates all changes that do not conflict with your version of the board, making it a snap to bring in a large amount of routing from another designer. Each designer can also define Work Regions, ensuring that everyone knows where they can work, and where they should not.
- Unified Cursor-Snap System
Altium Designer's PCB Editor already has a well-defined grid system – with visible grids, snap grid, component grid, and electrical grid all working to help you efficiently place your design objects on the PCB document.
Release 10 of Altium Designer introduces the new advanced Unified Cursor-Snap System. This system brings together three different sub-systems to collectively drive the way that the cursor snaps onto given sets of preferred coordinates: User-Definable Grids, available in both Cartesian and polar flavors; Snap Guides, that can be freely placed and provide a handy visual cue for object alignment; and enhanced object Snap-Points, enabling placed objects to pull the cursor into position based on cursor proximity to an object's hotspot(s). Placing and aligning objects in the PCB workspace is now a snap.
To see this in action, watch the Custom Grids and Cursor Snap Management and Working Guides videos
- PCB 3D Video
To offer more engaging, more useful documentation of your board, Release 10 of Altium Designer provides the ability to generate PCB 3D Video documentation. The content of a PCB 3D Video is simply a sequential set of snapshots (Key Frames) of your board, in 3D. A frame sequence is interpolated and exported as a video using the powerful Multimedia Publisher – a configurable output medium added to Release 10 solely for generation of PCB 3D Video.
To see this in action, watch the PCB 3D flyovers video
- Support for Atmel Touch Controls
Pick up any of the latest electronic gadgets today, and you'll probably find a cool user interface – complete with touch-sensitive controls such as buttons, sliders and wheels. To accommodate the use of such controls in your electronic products, Release 10 of Altium Designer provides full support for creating planar capacitive sensor patterns on your PCB, for use with the range of Atmel® QTouch® and QMatrix® sensor controllers.
To see this in action, watch the Atmel QTouch® support video
Soft design
- FPGA Debugging - Peripheral Register
View
Release 10 of Altium Designer introduces a new panel view that allows you to interact with a peripheral component's internal registers during the development phase of your embedded design – the Peripherals panel. Accessible during debug sessions while the processor is paused, the panel gives you an intelligent 'window' to view the state of the peripheral.
To see this in action, watch the Peripheral Register View video
- Aldec
Altium has partnered with Aldec to take Altium Designer's
To see this in action, watch the Aldec OEM simulator video
- 2G/3G
Release 10 sees the arrival of 2G and 3G mobile internet support added through the Software Platform, ready for Altium's forthcoming GSM-GPRS-
You can now easily develop wireless applications that connect to the web and/or a mobile carrier network, without the need to design and build your own custom hardware. Mobile solutions for custom low-volume applications can be prohibitively expensive and difficult to get certified. In a world embracing smart-connected devices, this welcome addition to the Software Platform enables fast and streamlined development of those devices, and the applications that run on them.
To see this in action, watch the 2G/3G Mobile connectivity video
