One of the driving forces behind Altium is our focus on innovation and the aim of developing design tools that help engineers and designers unlock their creative potential. As a result our design tools are highly flexible, powerful and feel like a natural, almost organic, extension of the creative process. In practice, Altium Designer is the sort of design environment that gives you the freedom to easily explore new ways to design, and new approaches to old processes.
But from a design data management perspective, consider these principles for a moment; flexibility, freedom, creativity, ease of use. They aren't concepts normally associated with high integrity data forged under a rigorous design data management process. The reason is that, traditionally, data integrity "solutions" have focused almost entirely on locking things down and controlling change – throwing up barrier after barrier to prevent issues from ever occurring.
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| Design data management can constrain innovation |
Whether that's a software solution or a paper based approach, with long lists of signatures and complex approval processes, the result is almost always the same. We might improve the integrity of the data, but the seeds of creativity that are the key to design innovation end up squashed by an imposed design management bureaucracy that never gives them the chance to grow.
Tying the hands of engineers and PCB designers looking for ways to express themselves during the design process is not the answer, and freedom and flexibility should not be considered barriers to developing a rigorous process flow. So what is the answer?
Development
For Altium, the solutions have been developing for some time. Over the last few years we have introduced a whole host of new features into Altium Designer that have been designed to improve both the integrity, and productivity of the electronics design process.
Beginning with the introduction of the first and only truly unified electronics design platform, we’d soon realized that the greatest gains weren't going to be achieved with just incremental improvements to the schematic and PCB editors. Of course, these improvements had to continue, but the greatest returns would instead come from problems beyond the domains – challenges like synchronization or storage, that lie in the no-man's land between (or just beyond) the core tools.
We therefore set our sights on solving this new class of design data problems with the introduction of a range of new features, with each targeted at different dimensions of the data management problem.
This included features such as:
- Version control support.
- A complete system for synchronization across each of the different domains (whether schematic to PCB, PCB to schematic, FPGA to schematic to PCB to FPGA...any data and in any direction).
- The ability to synchronize Electrical and Mechanical CAD with the world's first and only full-featured 3D PCB editing environment.
- Database-managed libraries of unified components.
- Design reuse with device sheets.
- A highly controllable, repeatable system for managing outputs.
- And much more…
The customers that have truly adopted our methodology have realized tremendous improvements in productivity, with recent surveys indicating that some 84% of new customers have seen at least a 200% growth in their productivity. And over 24% have seen something like 400% improvement.
But that impressive productivity improvement isn't enough if we don’t also attack the problems of data integrity versus design innovation head-on – two seemingly opposing forces. Higher integrity processes require that we lock down more and more of the design flow, where innovation demands flexibility. So along with the progress already made in Altium Designer, the how do we now develop a highly robust, high integrity process that doesn’t stand in the way of innovation? One way, is to automate the process.
When examining the data integrity problem it was clear that we had to take another look at the design data, and in particular, how that data was transformed from what’s required in the design space to what's required for production. It led us to several important conclusions, the first being that we needed a different storage model for data during the design process, than what's required for the release data.
This difference is because information is constantly changing during design, but once that data is released, it represents a specific "item" or some tangible "thing" that we make and sell. It takes on a very different form when released, and this has led us to introduce a new concept, called Vaults.
The Design Vault
The first vault is the Design Vault, and this is really a repositioning of the Version Control features included in previous versions of Altium Designer. Building on our experience with version control, and version control systems, we knew that this represented the sort of storage model required during the fast paced, ever-changing world of design. But it also needed to be simple. It needed to be something that didn’t carry a heavy administration overhead, and it had to be a system that could setup in minutes, rather than days. And just as important, it needed to be something that engineers and PCB designers could easily use without impacting their existing workflow.
This vault allows users to check data in and out, while maintaining a complete revision history of all of the changes being made over the lifecycle of the design process. Because there’s a complete change history and nothing is overwritten, multiple users can collaborate on the same design, safely and easily. And of course, that history means we can always roll back our changes to previous versions.
The Release Vault
The next requirement was for a Release Vault, or in practice, some place to safely and easily store the release data required to produce a particular “item”. But this is a rather more complex problem to solve, in that a design is somewhat abstract and generally made up of a single set of source data that represents multiple items. Different variants of a design (bare boards, assembled boards, etc) all reference the same source data in our design vault but represent very different “Items” when the data leaves the design domain for production.
It therefore creates a more complex storage problem. It also required hat we create a mechanism that allows the data in the design domain to be mapped to the data needed to produce each particular item, or thing. To address this problem we have introduced a new stage that sits in between the design and production domains, which is a totally unique concept known as the PCB Project Configuration.
The configuration is the backbone of the
release process, and defines all of the parameters required to map a project in
the design space to a real item. This is where we define exactly what
outputs are required to manufacture a bare board, or the variant of a
particular assembly. What’s more, it’s also where we define the
constraints that are applied to the release process itself. We’re
defining what validations a design has to go through before being released into
the Release Vault, such as running an ERC or a
The Release Vault is on the receiving end of the data that’s defined and validated by the configuration, and then generated through the release process. It’s important to note that it’s not just outputs, but a completely validated set of source files that gives us an audit trail directly back to the source data used to produce a given item. And even better, it can be tracked all the way back through to the Design Vault, where we have complete history of each and every change ever made over the course of a design. Take a look at the webinar video for more details on how the Release Valult works.
The Release Vault represents truly unprecedented visibility into the design and release process. It provides a complete view of the release history of a production item, including revisions that are frozen in time as design snapshots. Behind each of these different revisions is a complete set of data, along with the snapshot of the design, that’s archived with any generated outputs. And because the Release Vault is a separate entity it can be accessed by procurement or production people just as easily – they needn't be in the Design Space to access the data.
Tying it all together with the Release Process Manager
With all the storage and auditing systems in place, the question that remains is how do you generate the data and load it into the Release Vault, while maintaining the integrity of the design data?
This is where the Release Process Manager comes in. It’s an automated system that performs the actual release process – generating the data and loading it into the Release Vault – thereby removing the risks associated with relying on error-prone manual processes.
The Process Manager interface is really the entry point into the high integrity release process flow discussed here. It's the single place where you can manage the entire validation and release process, or in effect, the complete flow from design through to production – from creating a snapshot, to validating the design, to generating outputs and finally, committing the release. You can see the Release Process Manager in action in the webinar video.
Altium Designer release 10 brings together a host of different technologies and processes that make the transition from design, to production easy and accurate. Because we've eliminated the manual processes – checklists and signature chains – and consolidating the entire release process into a single, push-button system instead, the integrity of the outgoing data is now unparalleled.
The risk of going to production with a design that wasn't validated or not in sync is vastly reduced, as is the chace of sending an incomplete set of manufacturing data to your fabricator or assembler. The system provides an audit trail that gives you total visibility from the release data back to the source data, even to the level of day to day, hour to hour changes to that design information.
But most importantly, you can do all this without having to give up the flexibility, freedom, creativity, and innovation that’s needed for you, and your company, to stay competitive.
