Contact Us
Contact our corporate or local offices directly.
Created: January 10, 2022 | Updated: September 2, 2022
Now reading version 22. For the latest, read: Tutorial - A Complete Design Walkthrough with Altium Designer for version 23
Applies to Altium Designer versions: 22 and 23
Welcome to the world of electronic product development in Altium's world-class electronic design software. This tutorial will help you get started by taking you through the entire process of designing a simple PCB – from idea to output files.
The Design
The design for which you will be creating the schematic and designing a printed circuit board (PCB) is a simple astable multivibrator. The circuit is shown below; it uses two general-purpose NPN transistors configured as a self-running astable multivibrator.
Circuit for the multivibrator.
The animation of the designed PCB
Altium Designer can connect to a Workspace to provide a single, secure data source and storage while affording unparalleled collaboration. It could be an Altium 365 Workspace – a Workspace hosted on the Altium 365 cloud-based infrastructure platform, or an Enterprise Server Workspace – a Workspace provided through the Altium On-Prem Enterprise Server, installed and managed by your own IT department.
This tutorial focuses on using Altium Designer with a connected Workspace – the most streamlined and empowered environment for your design needs. However, if you are not able to enjoy the benefits that a connected Workspace brings, you can store your design data, including projects, component libraries, and design outputs, locally on your hard drive or in a shared network resource.
To complete this tutorial, you will need to be connected to a Workspace. It is assumed that your Workspace has been activated/installed with the sample data.
► Learn more about Designing with a Connected Workspace
► Learn more about Accessing Your Workspace
You're ready to begin capturing (drawing) the schematic. The first step is to create a PCB project.