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Elevate Your PCB Design Experience

You deserve the best PCB design experience, regardless of your business’s size and budget. By making a change from Mentor PADS® to Altium Designer®, you can be sure that your design experience keeps up with your most current design challenges.

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Get all the features you need in one design experience with Altium Designer, the world’s most popular PCB design software, and Altium 365®, our cloud-based platform that helps you work from anywhere and connect with anyone.

Mentor PADS® is a registered trademark of Siemens Industry Software Inc. and its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries.
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“Altium has an unrivaled track record of putting the engineer back in the driver's seat.”

The Premium PCB Design Experience for Everyone

Explore just some of the reasons why Altium Designer and Altium 365 are the
number one choice of professional PCB Designers and engineers worldwide.

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Seamless Migration from PADS

See how simple it is to migrate from PADS to the full feature functionality of Altium Designer. Get a peek at how you can easily get started on Altium Designer with your existing projects. 

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Elegant Design Experience

One of the biggest frustrations for Mentor users are the multiple editors for PCB layout and routing.

In the Altium Designer Unified Design Environment, the editor spans across the entire design flow, from schematic capture to simulation, PCB layout through to generating manufacturing outputs and documentation. The experience is easy to learn and use, all with seamless integration.

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Cloud Components

Keep your most valuable design data secure and accessible in one centralized location.

Efficiently find and place the parts you need without interrupting your design focus.

You’ll never worry about part availability for manufacturing with linked data for pricing and stock from your preferred suppliers.

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Take Control of Your Supply Chain

Today’s global components and parts shortages are challenging electronic OEMs. Manufacturer parts search in Mentor is limited to a third party resource with only a few distributors—placing customers at a huge disadvantage. 

Altium Designer offers searchable data to hundreds of component vendors at the same time. Instantly download new parts, including schematic symbols, PCB decals or footprints and 3D models all with real-time supply chain intelligence.

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An Unrivaled Routing Experience

When you spend most of your time routing, you need an experience that’s a natural extension of your creativity. As opposed to PADS, Altium Designer allows you to effortlessly design your board with the most responsive routing engine available.

Push, Slide, Hug, Walkaround any angle, and tune for delay. Route it your way, faster than ever. The advanced capabilities in Altium Designer ensure that your traces fit and signals arrive on time.

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30 Second Design Reviews 

Experience the fastest design reviews ever with Altium 365. Ensure all of your project stakeholders always have the latest version of the design. Via a web browser, team members can view, measure, search, cross probe, and comment on designs.

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User Satisfaction Ratings

All user reviews were gathered from G2, an
independent third-party review website.

What Customers Are Saying

The reason I wanted to switch tools was a lot of dissatisfaction with PADS. The user interface is outdated. This is a huge problem. 

Jeremy Frank, Electrical Engineer at Systron Donner

It took me 3-4 years to convince management that we needed to move from PADS. Every engineer we interviewed had used Altium Designer, but none had used PADS. That finally convinced them to switch.

Brad Kelley, Engineering and Product Manager at Web Electronics

I’ve been using Altium Designer for about a year. I enjoy it! It’s much easier than PADS. I enjoy putting the puzzle together that is the PCB. The biggest value in Altium Designer for me is the Active BOM. The ability to view parts and availability in near-real-time is great.

Brandon Varner, Lead PCB Designer at Sunrise Medical

We switched from PADS to Altium because we needed an EDA solution that would allow real-time collaboration with other R&D teams within our organization, something that PADS does not offer. In addition to the collaboration, we found that Altium integrates with SolidWorks much better than PADS integration,therefore improving the accuracy of our models and decreasing our time to market.

Craig Hockenberry, Senior Engineering Manager at Gibson Brands

FAQs

Quick guide on your licensing and migration questions

How do I migrate my existing PADS design data into Altium Designer?

The Altium Designer Import Wizard is able to import your existing PADS schematics, PCB, and library files. However ASCII versions of the design files need to be created.

 

Following ASCII file formats required from PADS

ASCII PCB -- *.asc , 

ASCII PCB Library -- *.D, 

ASCII Schematic  -- *.txt,

ASCII Schematic library -- *C + *.P  

 

Import is performed using the Import Wizard (File » Import Wizard). Select PADS® Layout and PADS® Logic Designs and Libraries entry to gain access to the PADS Import Wizard.


Resources: Migration Guide, Video Walkthrough

 

Where can I find Support?

Altium Designer includes easy access to real-time support, user communities, comprehensive product documentation, training videos, and a knowledge base of targeted solutions for everyday user experiences.

What training options are available?

Altium’s Getting Started guide is an outstanding resource where new users can rapidly become successful in designing projects with Altium Designer. In addition, on-demand or live online and onsite, instructor-led Altium Designer training courses are also available.

Do you have any “how-to” videos that can assist me in various board design tasks?

The Altium Academy is an online experience created to bring modern education to PCB Designers and Engineers globally.

Learn directly from professionals and industry experts as they share their knowledge covering basic PCB design principles, how-to videos, advanced engineering topics, and everything in-between

Where can I find Altium Designer documentation?

Altium's technical documentation is available online. It includes an expansive set of resources that helps you find the information you need for your printed circuit board design needs.

Whether you are looking for a high-level overview of a particular subject or need precise information regarding how to use a specific panel, dialog, preference, etc. We use a versioning system to easily switch to the correct version of documentation for the version you are using.

Why switch to Altium Designer from Siemens PADS?

Altium Designer® offers a unified design environment, empowering engineers with a single view of every aspect of the PCB design process from schematic to PCB layout, to design documentation.

By accessing all design tools in one place, engineers can complete their entire design process within the same intuitive environment and deliver high-quality products quickly.

 

Altium Designer Features

How widely used is Altium Designer?

Altium Designer is the most widely used software used for designing printed circuit boards in the world. Designers with Altium fluency are consistently in heavy demand.

The ubiquity of the software has spawned an entire ecosystem of bloggers and vloggers, giving new users of Altium an extra level of assurance that they can access assistance anytime and anywhere.

Do you have any reference designs or data to get me started?

Altium offers a variety of sources for reference designs, libraries, and project templates. In addition, many of the world’s semiconductor device vendors publish their reference designs natively in the Altium Designer format giving designers an extra advantage when starting new product development.

Does Altium provide direct sales and technical support?

Whether you are a one-person startup or a global, multi-site organization, your engagement point is direct with Altium.

The company is focused solely on providing enabling software to designers to rapidly and efficiently design complex PCBs while assuring first-pass volume manufacturing success. 

What is Altium 365?

Altium 365 is the electronics product design platform that unites PCB Design, MCAD, data management, and teamwork together like never before. Design, share, and manufacture, all in Altium Designer without changing a thing about how you already work.

 

A cloud-based platform, Altium 365 works in conjunction and is tightly integrated within Altium Designer. There is no installation necessary. All you have to do is to activate your Altium 365 Workspace here.

Customer Success

Altium has been helping users just like you for more than
35 years. View their stories and start to create your own.