Altium

Once again, Altium is pushing the boundaries of what's possible in electronics design. New features to create device intelligence and then test it. New ways to unify electronics design with mechanical design. New ways to create PCBs. All within a single, unified design environment.

Altium now makes it even easier for electronics designers to create more intelligent and innovative products that deliver sustainable market differentiation. Take a look at the highlights below and the new preview videos at www.altium.com/summer08iscoming/

Altium Designer: New feature highlights

Altium Designer’s 3D capabilities have been enhanced to allow direct linking to external STEP models, an intelligent 3D file format supported by all major MCAD software. This means that you can bring mechanical assemblies or case designs done in MCAD software into Altium Designer. Features have been added to allow full interference/clearance checking between any objects in the design, such as components and the case that surrounds them,. Updates to the source STEP models are detected by Altium Designer, providing a dynamic link between the electronic and mechanical domains.

New interactive routing engine
Altium has been progressively introducing interactive routing technologies that aid, rather than control, the routing process with each release. Altium Designer now takes a giant leap forward with an entirely new interactive routing engine that sports a set of fast and intuitive new features.

Basic operation modes include fast and robust push-and-shove of tracks and vias, new routing options for rapid trace placement, automatic hugging of existing traces when routing, and improved route auto-completion. Modes can be used independently or in combination to provide excellent control in all routing situations. Being able to ‘guide’ the routing, rather than having to place and anchor each trace segment along the way, makes a huge difference to routing efficiency. In this mode, routing can be undone by simply ‘backing up’ over the previous path.

Design Insight
Altium extends the Board Insight features previously introduced to the wider design environment. New Design Insight features provide even faster, easier and more intuitive project navigation:

• Document Insight: Gives you automatic previews of documents when you hover over entries in the Project Panel or Document Bar
• Project Insight: Allows you to preview all documents in a project by simply hovering over the project icon in the Projects Panel
• Connectivity Insight: Lets you hover over any net in your schematic source files and get a popup preview of all documents in the project connected to that net, as well as a list of connection nodes

Improved design data publishing features
Altium Designer simplifies the job of generating the right outputs for publishing with its Output Job editor and files, which provide a centralized interface from which to define all required outputs. Generating different types of output is easier with the addition of Output Media options in the Output Job editor. This lets you consolidate multiple outputs into a single media type. For example, you can put the schematics, composite PCB layout and bill of materials (BoMs) into a single PDF output.

Multiple Media Outputs of the same type can be defined and named to allow outputs to be grouped and generated in a variety of ways. The addition of this feature means that you define exactly the information you want to print or publish to PDF and then generate the output, as a single operation.

Improved representation of internal planes
Plane support has been significantly upgraded and enhanced. Internal planes are now modeled and displayed in 2D and 3D with 100% accuracy in the PCB editor. Also, the DRC now includes live connectivity checking of planes and will detect net breaks caused by inadvertent plane splits, isolated pads and vias, and starved thermal relief connections.

The end result is that you can create internal signal planes in your designs and be confident that what you see and verify in the PCB editor will translate into a correct set of manufacturing files. This eliminates discrepancies between design and manufacturing files. And you get a much higher degree of visibility into the final shape, connectivity and electrical integrity of your plane layers. This in turn leads to less errors going to manufacture and fewer prototype spins.

Improved integration with version control systems
One of the traditional problems of extending version control to the electronics design process has been that at the board level, electronics design is largely a graphical task. Schematic and PCB documents can easily be stored within a version control repository, but comparing different versions of the same files is not simple to do, as it is with text-based files.

Altium now solves this problem by building integration to version control directly into the design interface of Altium Designer, and providing specific features to allow the direct comparison of graphical files. The powerful differencing engine within Altium Designer can highlight the smallest of graphical changes between different versions of schematic or PCB files, even when these changes have no effect on the connectivity of the design. Version control support has been enhanced to allow background fetches and updates of design files from the version control repository, while you are working. And all working file copies within a project can be updated with a single command.

Custom wishbone interface component
Altium uses the non-proprietary Wishbone bus interface to make connecting together FPGA-based peripheral component blocks easy and fast. Altium Designer now includes a new custom Wishbone Interface component that can be easily configured to link custom peripherals to the Wishbone bus. This lets you create or import custom functionality that can be easily combined with Altium Designer’s in-built components.

The end result is that you can add to the peripheral devices supplied with Altium Designer, bringing in your own devices to perform whatever tasks you require. This greatly increases the scope of applications that can be developed using Altium Designer and opens up the system for you to build your own custom peripheral libraries, or to develop custom peripherals that can be used by others.

New custom virtual instrument component
Altium Designer’s FPGA-based virtual instruments carry out the typical functions found in bench-top test instruments. Altium now adds a new dimension to the concept with the introduction of a fully-configurable Custom Instrument. You can now construct your own instrument to monitor and control signals within the FPGA. You choose the number and type of inputs and outputs you want, create custom scripts (in DelphiScript) to process the signals or respond to events as required, and build a custom interface or GUI for the instrument from a palette of standard components and instrument controls.

One interesting feature of the custom instrument is that the instrument interface can be stored as part of the design that is downloaded to the FPGA. This means that you can create full custom test or maintenance interfaces for a product and store it inside the design. Any service engineer can then plug in to the design using Altium Designer, instantly have access to the custom instrument panel without having to have a copy of the instrument definition stored on their computer.

C-based custom FPGA logic development
To extend beyond the royalty-free FPGA-based components supplied with Altium Designer, the system also supports the creation of custom logic blocks using schematic entry or an HDL. Altium has now extended this capability to allow custom logic blocks to be defined using the C programming language.

Blocks of C code can now be added within the schematic design hierarchy, and when the design is compiled, the code is translated to VHDL using the unified hardware/software compiler technology (or C-to-Hardware technology). It is then synthesized to FPGA along with the rest of the design. This new use of the technology extends the opportunities for embedded software developers by allowing you to write custom blocks of logic using C code and ‘wire’ these directly into the underlying system hardware.

Allegro PCB import
In response to customer requests, Altium has enhanced the unified Import Wizard to support the automatic conversion and import of Cadence Allegro PCB documents.

The translator supports Allegro Version 15.2 and 16 files and invokes features built into the Allegro product to complete the process. (Note: Allegro must be installed on your system for Altium Designer to import files).