The Best Printed Circuit Board Design Software for Your Aluminum PCB

Whether for thermal performance, electrical isolation, or mechanical strength, your aluminum PCB needs the precision of Altium Designer to meet your design requirements.

ALTIUM DESIGNER

The most powerful, modern and easy-to-use PCB design tool for professional use.

More and more designs are using metal core PCBs. The metal substrate provides a more robust core material both mechanically and with its thermal conductivity, and the dielectric layer choices offer a greater level of electrical isolation. MCPCBs are being used for LEDs, solid state relays, and power conversion PCBs to name a few of their applications. The most commonly used metal in these MCPCBs is an aluminum base, and with their growing popularity, you may find yourself soon designing an aluminum PCB if you aren’t already. There is one key point that you need to know, and that is the same precision in design that you have become accustomed to will also be required in designing aluminum PCBs. To maintain that high level of precision, your aluminum designs need the best PCB design software that you can get; they need Altium Designer.

Aluminum Circuitry is Unique Requiring the Best PCB Design Software

Aluminum PCB designs need to start off with a detailed and accurate schematic as any other multilayer PCB design would. Whether through careful attention to copper foil placement and heat dissipation, printed circuit layer and thermal conductivity, you’ll need a PCB editor to let you do your job. Altium Designer has you covered with its schematic capture application that is easy to learn and intuitive to use. Once completed, your schematic data will be used by Altium Designer’s layout editor to create your printed circuit boards.

Aluminum printed circuit board designs need to follow precise component placement constraints in order to maximize their thermal management and mechanical benefits. Altium Designer is ready to assist you with smart component placement features that will allow you to position and align your components as required for the greatest heat dissipation. From there you can use the wide assortment of Altium Designer’s interactive routing capabilities to complete the connectivity of your aluminum PCB.

The Core of Any PCB Design is Altium Designer’s Superior Place and Route

Depending on your concern over if your circuit board is thermally conductive, or if you are just looking at organizing your printed circuit layers, strong PCB design software will help. No matter what design you are working on, Altium Designer is prepared with the best schematic capture and PCB layout place and route tools that you can get.

• Whether you’re conducting with one or more copper foil layers, are considering different metal core pcbs, or set on an aluminum base, Altium Designer’s schematic editor is easy and intuitive, and you will quickly be creating the circuitry for your printed circuit board design.

  Learn More about Altium Designer’s easy to use schematic capture application.

• Component placement is more important in an aluminum PCB than ever, and Altium Designer has smart component placement functions to help you get it done right.

  Learn More about Altium Designer’s smart component placement features.

• With Altium Designer you will have all the interactive routing functionality that you will need to route a quality aluminum PCB.

  Learn More about your interactive routing options in Altium Designer.

Superior place and route tools combined with a native 3D engine will give you the advantage

Advanced Tools for Your Aluminum PCB Project

Your aluminum PCB designs will need to fit into their system enclosures and interact with other mechanical features, and here is another area where Altium Designer will really be able to help you. With the native 3D engine technology that Altium is well known for, you will be able to verify and adjust your component placement in full 3D. You also will be able to import your mechanical system design data into your layout to verify your design against the entire system which is very beneficial for rigid-flex PCB designs.

If you need to manage multiple variants of your aluminum PCB design, there’s no problem as Altium Designer has you covered. You can track and manage your design variants easily with the variant tools in Altium Designer. In fact, any sort of global editing to your design database is simple with Altium Designer’s intuitive user interface. You can make changes easily to your database and have those changes propagated throughout the design as they should without repetitive editing on your part. Altium Designer really was created to make your job as the PCB designer easier so that you can focus on the important aspects of designing an aluminum based printed circuit board.

Altium Designer has the Functionality that You Need to go Beyond Place and Route

Make sure that any component can work alongside any circuit. With the demands on your time and efforts as a designer, you need the advanced functionality in Altium Designer to make sure your design is ready to go at 100%.

• Eliminate the money spent on prototype builds by verifying your component placement to mechanical features with Altium Designer’s native 3D engine.

  Learn More about component placement verification and changes in Altium Designer’s native 3D engine.

• There’s no need to manage multiple databases, with Altium Designer’s variant management tools you can control multiple design variants all from one design.

  Learn More about working with design variants in Altium Designer.

• Altium Designer was created with you in mind so that you can make global database edits easily without manually tracking each change through scores of files.

  Learn More about the ease of being able to make global edits within the Altium Designer environment.

Automated drawing creation along with other manufacturing output aids will keep you ahead

Panelizing PCB Methods and Other Manufacturing Outputs

When your aluminum PCB design is finished, there’s still more to do in order to get the design into the hands of your manufacturer. Fortunately Altium Designer is prepared to help you with this part of the job as well. First of all, Altium Designer takes the guesswork out of manufacturing by giving you the tools you need to panelize your design. With this capability, your manufacturers will work with your design data the way you want them to.

Altium Designer also gives you the ability to auto-generate manufacturing drawings with Draftsman. This will allow you to create quality documentation in a fraction of the time that you are used to. And finally, when it is time to put it all together, Altium Designer once again is ready to help with reusable configurable batch job output files. This way you don’t have to manually create the same files over and over again each time you send the job out. Altium Designer, a powerful design tool that will see you through the design all the way to the final outputs.

Altium Designer Puts the Control of the Design Into Your Hands where it Should Be

Make your components and copper foil are laid out correctly over the aluminum base or other metal core, every time. Instead of being driven by schedule demands and the requirements of your manufacturers, Altium Designer will give you control over your manufacturing data with automation to get the job done on time.

• Altium Designer allows you to create manufacturing panels the way that you want them to be created.

  Learn More about panelizing your design in Altium Designer.

• With Draftsman in Altium Designer, you can auto-generate high-quality drawings in a fraction of the normal time.

  Learn More about automating the creation of your manufacturing drawings in Altium Designer.

• Altium Designer’s batch job output files will automate the tedious task of outputting each manufacturing file individually every time you send the job out.

  Learn More about working with batch job output files in Altium Designer.

Designing an aluminum printed circuit board can be a demanding task, and to do it right you need the power of Altium Designer on your side.