Altium Designer Documentation

Altium Designer combines a multitude of features and functionality, including:

• Advanced routing technology

• Support for cutting-edge rigid-flex board design

• Powerful data management tools

• Powerful design reuse tools

• Simulation tools for comprehensive circuit and layout analysis

• Real-time cost estimation and tracking

• Dynamic supply chain intelligence

• Native 3D visualizations and clearance checking

• Advanced multi-board and harness design

• Flexible output preparation and release management tools

Altium Designer brings together various editors and tools and provides a consistent user interface across them. All of this functionality is delivered through, and the entire design process is performed within, a single Unified Design Environment – the only one of its kind, and it is engineered to deliver optimal productivity. A consistent selection and editing paradigm across different editors allows you to easily and smoothly switch between various design tasks within the Altium Designer environment. The Altium Designer environment is fully customizable, which allows you to set up the design space to suit the way you work.

The unified nature of Altium Designer allows for seamless movement of design data from one design realm to the next. At the start, the perceived steep learning curve can appear to be a formidable blockade to this productivity-enhancing landscape, and the wealth of features it contains. This, the core space for documentation specific to Altium Designer, provides all the information needed to quickly get you up and running with the software.

Jumping into PCB Design (and Altium Designer)

New to board design and/or Altium Designer, and wondering where to begin? This tutorial will take you from a blank schematic sheet all the way to generating the files needed to fabricate the bare board for a simple nine-component circuit.

The design you will be capturing and then designing a printed circuit board (PCB) for is a simple astable multivibrator. The circuit – shown to the left – uses two general-purpose NPN transistors configured as a self-running astable multivibrator.

The tutorial touches on many of the areas of the software that you will need to become familiar with in your day-to-day design work. What better way to familiarize yourself with and get to know your powerful design 'partner'?

QuickStart Paging

Within this documentation, there are key, top-level pages that, when considered together, provide a valuable set of 'QuickStart' information. Such paging takes you through a particular design area, giving you just the right amount of detail to get you up and running with your understanding of that area, without diving too deeply. These pages are:

• Getting Familiar with the Altium Design Environment

• Capturing Your Design Idea as a Schematic

• Analyzing Your Design Using Circuit Simulation

• BOM Management with ActiveBOM

• Managing Design Changes between the Schematic & PCB

• Laying Out Your PCB

• Streamlining Board Design Documentation with Draftsman

• Preparing Your Design for Manufacture

• Designing with Multiple PCBs

• Harness Design

Designing with a Connected Workspace

To handle your valuable design data while affording unparalleled collaboration, Altium Designer can connect to, and work with, a Workspace. The Workspace not only provides rock-solid, secure storage of data but also enables re-release of data as distinctly separate revisions – essentially tracking design changes over time without overwriting any previously released data. It also caters to the lifecycle of the data to be managed, allowing people that need to use the data to see at a glance what stage the data has reached in its 'life' and, therefore, what it can be safely used for.

The Workspace is used to manage all design data, including components, domain models, schematic sheets of circuitry, and design templates. Indeed, you can even create and manage your entire design projects directly within the Workspace.

By furnishing a set of reusable design 'building blocks' within the Workspace, you can embark on fresh projects safe in the knowledge that each model, component, and higher-order design element has been ratified and approved for use, without having to reinvent the wheel as it were. The Workspace becomes both the source and destination of design elements, with each new design utilizing elements released to and managed through the Workspace. Additionally, by designing only with elements from the Workspace, the integrity of those designs is inherently assured.

Altium Designer connects to a Workspace. That Workspace can be delivered in one of the following ways:

• A Workspace hosted on Altium 365 – the cloud platform underpinning the various solutions available from Altium: Altium Develop and Altium Agile. The core Workspace of this constituent 'engine' is branded to reflect its association to each solution accordingly:

  • Altium Develop Workspace – when created as part of the Altium Develop solution.

  • Altium Agile Workspace – when created as part of the Altium Agile solution.

  In this documentation, Altium 365 is used when referring to this platform and Altium 365 Workspace when referring to a Workspace hosted on this platform.

• A Workspace provided through the Altium On-Prem Enterprise Server. Also referred to as an Enterprise Server Workspace, this is installed and managed by your own IT department.

With an Altium 365 Workspace, you'll benefit from a richer set of collaborative features, including Global Sharing. And because it is cloud-based, you get the latest version of the Workspace without having to worry about manual upgrades.

ECAD-MCAD Co-Design

Most electronic products that are designed are fixed to some kind of mechanical structure – either a chassis or an enclosure. Finding a mechanical conflict between the board (ECAD) and chassis/enclosure (MCAD) late in the design process can be a costly experience. And while you could get a 3D model exported from Altium Designer, it is a manual process that needs a conscious decision and action to do so. In reality, this is performed very infrequently, with the result being that the MCAD designer is never quite sure if what they've got is the latest and greatest. It really shouldn’t be so hard to ensure you’re not about to waste a pile of money just because your tools don’t talk.

Working between the electronic and mechanical design domains brings unique challenges. Small and complex product enclosures that house multiple, irregular shaped printed circuit boards - to successfully design these products the ECAD and MCAD designers must be able to fluidly pass design changes back and forth between their design domains.

Passing complex and detailed design changes between different design software is much more than just being able to save data in another format. The electronic and mechanical design teams work independently and need to be able to selectively transfer design changes at any point in their design process.

A Workspace provides native ECAD to MCAD collaboration where data flows seamlessly between domains. No more polling for updates and no more uncertainty. Data is pushed between domains as the design evolves, ensuring design coherence.

Learn As You Go

Backing Altium Designer is a comprehensive set of online documentation. Wherever you are in the environment, over a menu command, a dialog, a panel, or a design object, press F1 to display comprehensive information about whatever was under the cursor.

Within this comprehensive information, there are links to related information about how to place it, edit it, or use it. You also will find links to richer content about how it fits into the overall design process.

If you prefer to browse and explore the overall structure, use the navigation tree on the left.

Available shortcuts also are listed in the various panels; look for the shortcut keystrokes displayed next to the controls in the panel.