Altium

Unified Allegro import wizard

It’s one thing to recognize the clear advantages of moving to Altium’s award-winning unified design solution, but it’s another to deal with the potential pain of translating your valuable design IP to a new system. For Allegro users that are moving up to Altium Designer, Altium has made this process as easy and reliable as possible with the introduction of a new file importer.

Allegro files can now be easily brought into Altium Designer, with minimum disruption to workflow and little risk of transfer errors. Altium Designer transparently invokes in-built features of Allegro to convert Allegro binary files to an intermediate ASCII text format. This is then parsed and imported into an Altium Designer PCB design document and project. Allegro must be installed on the system for the new importer to function.

Providing advanced import tools makes it easy for designers to move from older-style legacy point tools to Altium Designer. Designers can then future-proof the design capabilities of the companies they work for and stay competitive in a rapidly changing market. The ability to import Allegro files has been an often-requested capability for Altium Designer.

By moving to Altium Designer, Allegro users will then have access to powerful new features: 3D visualization of the board during design; dynamic linking to MCAD files; single data model between schematic, board, FPGA and embedded design; and overall project and data collaboration and management capabilities.

Companies are looking for new ways to innovate and sustain differentiation in their field. They are recognizing the benefits Altium’s unified design solution offers to help them achieve this. For example SpaceX, the commercial space launch system developer, calls Altium Designer “an incredibly flexible and capable tool.” SpaceX’s senior engineer Matt Soule learnt Altium Designer, designed his board, and assembled and tested the PCB in two weeks!

Altium believes that all designers must have access to the best possible design technologies if they are to remain competitive into the future. Altium Designer’s new Allegro PCB file importer makes it easy to design next-generation ‘smart’ devices.

The latest release of Altium Designer is available now. Go to www.altium.com/summer08 to see the new Allegro Wizard in action, or to book a live web demo.