Altium Designer Summer08

Reference: www.altium.com/summer08

Defining the board shape directly from an imported STEP model.
Design and implement your own fully configurable FPGA-based virtual instrument.
Outjob Publishing Wizard - multiple outputs in the one PDF, with support for BOMs.
Tired of digging to find that document? Browse visually with Design Insight.
Check mechanical and component clearances in real-time, in glorious 3D.
It's fast. It's intuitive. It's breathtaking. It's an all new interactive routing engine.
Step into the future seamlessly with Altium Designer's Allegro importer.
Everything you ever needed for internal plane connectivity in both 2D and 3D.
Measure your FPGA power usage with the new Desktop NanoBoard NB2.
"Upgrading to Altium Designer's unified Electronic Development system will add Embedded Intelligence capabilities to your Altium Designer board-level ...
Designing for an FPGA is done in the same familiar schematic environment as PCB design. You also use the familiar design methodology selecting and pl ...
Design capture is only the beginning of the process, the next step is to implement it. Altium Designer is tightly integrated with the NanoBoard, an FP ...
Your desktop becomes a hands-on electronics lab when you implement your FPGA design on the NanoBoard and test it from within Altium Designer. Test you ...
Altium Designer includes proven compiler/debugger technology from TASKING. The professional coding editor is linked to full embedded toolchains that s ...
You have access to the latest FPGA devices from all the popular vendors, including Actel, Altera, Lattice and Xilinx. Since device-specific informatio ...
Switching from one vendor's device to another will not require a major investment in re-learning new vendor software. All vendor software is driven au ...
Implementing a complex system design inside an FPGA is a neat way of separating the intellectual property from the silicon. This gives you the luxury ...
Another one of the strengths of implementing a complex design inside an FPGA is the potential to reduce the complexity of the PCB. To take advantage o ...
Anyone can access Altium Designer design files now, simply by installing the free Viewer Edition. The Viewer Edition lets you interrogate all aspects ...
To maximize your productivity as a designer the environment that you work in must be intuitive and flexible, and be in step with best practices for PC ...


Typically, an electronics design is built from a number of special purpose components required for this project, and a large number of generic compone ...
We all learn as we do things, and to help accelerate your learning Altium Designer includes greatly expanded online help, with context-sensitive F1 su ...
The Altium Designer documentation has been reorganized and restructured to make it more accessible. The documentation is accessed through the new Know ...
The new Default Document feature lets you exactly define the settings used in a new document when you select File » New from the menus. This could for ...
In Altium Designer 6.0 the new shortcuts panel displays a list of all the shortcuts that are available. This panel updates dynamically to show you the ...
Working back and forth between different Windows applications should not be hard, and with Altium Designer Windows clipboard support it isn’t. Circuit ...
The DXP platform has been upgraded to support Chinese (Simplified), Japanese, German and French languages installations. All menu items and most dialo ...
The ability to apply an edit globally has always been a strong feature of Altium software, but with Altium Designer, the capabilities of previous vers ...
Having the Inspector makes checking and editing properties easy, but you also need a way to select and edit multiple component designators. Complement ...
There are often times when it is better to look at the properties of objects in a tabular, or spreadsheet-like format. When you open the List panel, i ...


Underlying the global editing system is a filtering engine that is driven by a powerful query language. Query keywords instruct the filtering engine t ...
One task that has always been a difficult challenge is being able to move electronic product designs from one design environment to another. Whether y ...


44. Routing


Designers moving from legacy systems, such as an OrCAD® schematic + PADS® PCB editor combination can now easily transfer their valuable libraries and ...
The PADS Importer has been enhanced to now handle the import of PADS Logic files. This video shows the various PADS design and library file formats im ...
Rather than read the full technical document, view this video which is broken into sections highlighting the 10 most compelling reasons to upgrade to ...
Altium Designer's project-centric architecture has been enhanced with the ability to add any Windows file type to a project. When you click on a proje ...
If your design team does not use a version control system then managing shared design documents can be difficult. The new File Locking option resolves ...


Assembly Variants have been greatly improved in Altium Designer and the new major features will be demonstrated in this video. The video demo creates ...
Altium Designer's support for creating multiple assembly variants from a single project lets you handle the increasingly common approach of designing ...
Managing, archiving and transporting an entire design project is easy using the new Archive Wizard. The Wizard collects all the files used in the proj ...
Projects can be kept well structured, up-to-date and on-track with Altium Designer's enhanced project management capabilities. This one intuitive syst ...
Version control is becoming the preferred method of electronic document management within many companies. Not only do version control systems provide ...
In Altium Designer, the schematic to PCB cross probing has improved. You can now cross probe on any object, from a component, a pin, a net (both named ...
The traditional cross probe capabilities have also been backed up by a new Cross Select Mode – components on the PCB are automatically selected as you ...
The Navigator panel presents all components and nets in the entire design – you simply click to jump to and highlight. As well as being able to jump t ...
You can take complete control of the print process with Altium Designer. It’s quick and easy to preview the schematics or the board before you print a ...
You can use Altium Designer's print engine to precisely define the mix of PCB layers you want to print, set the scaling and orientation, and see exact ...


Altium Designer's highly-configurable reporting engine lets you output design data in the exact report format you require. As a Bill of Materials in a ...
With Altium Designer's Smart PDF your test engineering team can have a PDF that includes clickable bookmarks to jump to any net in the schematics for ...
The core of a design is the components, and Altium Designer includes a host of new and improved features that make working with components easier and ...
A new facility has been added to allow parametric- and query-based component searches. The searches can be done while doing other tasks so that you ca ...
Updating your design from the libraries can be fully managed using the new Update from Library Wizard. You can update the entire component, including ...
Components can be edited directly from the Libraries panel by right-clicking on a component in the component list and selecting Edit Component, or by ...
With Altium Designer, the symbols that you place on the schematic are now complete representations of the physical component, with full support for br ...
Altium Designer now includes a significantly enhanced library editor with linking from library components to your company database, a model manager to ...
The new library report generator builds a comprehensive report about all components in the selected library. Reports can be generated for schematic li ...
Pins can be edited in the List panel. Standard grid editing shortcuts are supported, and you can also copy and paste blocks of cells to and from the L ...


Along with enhanced component-to-database linking, Altium Designer offers a new approach to linking from a component to reference information such as ...
Smart Component Identification offers both the flexibility and control to be able to easily switch between locations of reference libraries, and ident ...
Altium Designer now recognizes the different nature of design components. You can include graphical schematic-only components on the schematic, mechan ...
Altium’s ISO 9001 accredited Library Development Center works constantly to expand and maintain the component set, posting regular free library update ...
The new Model Manager makes it easy to attach and delete models from multiple components simultaneously.
The IPC Footprint Wizard creates IPC-compliant component footprints. Rather than working from footprint dimensions, the IPC Footprint Wizard uses dime ...
The IPC Footprint Batch Generator makes it possible to quickly generate multiple footprints from a package input file containing datasheet package inf ...
The STEP format is quite a strong standard in the mechanical CAD world and thus is a good format for passing data between various packages. In Altium ...
With Altium Designer, all files, links and settings are stored as part of a project. When reloaded, projects are therefore ready to go without the nee ...
Altium Designer natively supports Protel 99SE format libraries, and continues to allow you to work with separate schematic and PCB libraries. However, ...



Component libraries can now be constructed with all symbol reference, model linking and parameter information stored in an ODBC or ADO based database, ...
Version control systems provide an ideal method for managing and controlling access to electronic documents. Altium Designer 6.3 brings library manage ...
The system supports previous Altium schematic and PCB library formats, allowing you to use your existing custom libraries within the DXP 2004 environm ...
Having the exact command available when you right-click in the workspace lets you move quickly through the design tasks. The new intelligent context-s ...
Altium Designer includes a raft of schematic wiring enhancements to accelerate the process of wiring up the design. These include: * automatic wi ...
Users can now copy and paste from Excel (or any other Windows clipboard source) directly onto a schematic sheet. This gives the user the ability to o ...
The new graphical compile masks allow you to effectively mask out areas of the schematic from the compilation process. Areas of the circuit covered by ...
Altium Designer's schematic editor now includes a powerful Footprint Manager. Launched from the Tools menu, the Footprint Manager lets you review all ...
As every engineer knows, a design evolves and the structure and presentation change shape as it develops. Altium Designer offers a sophisticated editi ...
A new system has been created to provide major productivity enhancements in schematic editing. The system allows a group of objects to be selected an ...


Wouldn't it be great if you could copy all the pin data from a manufacturer's datasheet, and paste it straight into your new schematic component? Thi ...
With Altium Designer 6.0 you can now edit text frames and notes in schematics directly on-screen, rather than in a separate editing dialog. To edit a ...
With Altium Designer 6, the Line drawing object has been made more versatile with the ability add arrows to the start and end points. You now have the ...
With Altium Designer you can specify as many parameters as you need to fully define a component. User-definable Parameters allow you to include anyth ...
Altium Designer Parameter Manager allows you to add, edit and remove parameters that are 'owned' by various object kinds in the source schematic docum ...
User-defined component and net classes can now be defined on the schematic. A net or a component is made a member of a class by adding the parameter C ...
Schematic objects can now be grouped into unions. These "unions" are created by simply selecting a group of objects, right clicking and choosing "Crea ...
Altium Designer finally delivers a viable method of designing a product that has repeated sections of circuitry, where you capture the section once an ...
Altium Designer includes a number of handy shortcuts that make it easy to navigate and move up and down through the project hierarchy. These include: ...
The new sheet symbol synchronizer can be used to quickly detect and resolve port mismatches.


Two new commands have been added to improve the already impressive list of hierarchy management capabilities in Altium Designer.
Altium Designer offers new sheet entry editing features that include multi-copy/paste and dragging, and intelligent sheet symbol resizing.
If you prefer to present your circuit as a flat design, you no longer need to include a top level sheet that contains only sheet symbols. Full design ...
Support for hierarchical designs – designs where the same section of circuitry is repeated – is an outstanding strength of Altium Designer. This has b ...
Featuring extensive schematic drawing and annotation tools, Altium Designer offers both advanced and convenient annotation options. Altium Designer's ...
Support for managing the packaging of multi-part components is included as well, with the ability to lock at the sub-part or at the component level al ...
117. PSpice
Altium Designer's mixed-signal simulator has been updated to provide compatibility with PSpice models and circuits.This allows the use of manufacturer ...
In this video you will see an example of Altium Designer's powerful Signal Integrity features being used to optimize signal drive settings in an FPGA ...
Users can now navigate through layers using the mouse wheel. This is enabled by holding down the Ctrl and Shift keys while scrolling the mouse wheel i ...
A complex-multi layer board makes for a visually dense and often difficult to interpret workspace. The new Board Insight system makes it easier to vie ...


A complex-multi layer board makes for a visually dense and often difficult to interpret workspace. The new Board Insight system makes it easier to vie ...
A complex-multi layer board makes for a visually dense and often difficult to interpret workspace. The new Board Insight system makes it easier to vie ...
It is now possible to turn a PCB over. This makes it easy to visualize how the board would look if it was turned over in the hand. All editing operati ...
A typical board design could include 8 signal layers, 4 plane layers and 10 mechanical layers, as well as the top and bottom silkscreen and ancillary ...
A new Layer Tab right click menu gives you new layer highlighting functionality which, enables you to show and hide a layer, and directly access layer ...
Altium Designer's PCB editor has a new Hardware Accelerated Graphics Engine. This engine provides a substantial increase in drawing speed over the cur ...
Editing in the PCB Editor graphical view has been enhanced by the new automatic workspace-to-panel tracking behavior. When the PCB Panel is set to com ...
Altium Designer now supports TrueType fonts for PCBs. This gives users access to a greater number of fonts. It also means foreign characters and symbo ...
Altium Designer 6.3 supports slotted and square holes in PCB pads. Slotted and square holes are defined in the redesigned PCB Pad dialog, giving you i ...
A new pad shape, Rounded Rectangle has been introduced for designing PCB footprints and layouts. It provides better compatability with P-CAD and other ...


Introducing the Hole Size Editor panel, a greater level of visibility and management of drill sizes is now possible. The panel lists all unique holes ...
Since we introduced, Preserve Angles When Dragging it has simplified the way routed tracks are extended and adjusted on a PCB. This feature now applie ...
Selection is a core function in the designer's editing toolset, being used constantly during the design process. New selection tools in the PCB editor ...
This allows a collection of selected objects to be moved by a specified distance in the x and y directions. This enables a finer degree of control whe ...
Today’s PCBs are often unusual in their shape and size, and required to fit into irregular locations or product housings. Not only does the PCB editor ...
The PCB layer stackup can be configured and visualized in the Layer Stack Manager. PCB physical properties can be specified, these values are used if ...
The new pairing of mechanical layers makes it easy to add in the numerous additional layers required in footprint design, such as glue layers or peela ...
The rectangular or multi-sided placement rooms are ideal for defining placement areas for related components. Rooms can be defined automatically for e ...
The density of today’s PCB designs demand that every available piece of real estate is effectively utilized. Achieving this often calls for creative c ...
PCB panelization is not just a feature needed by a bare-board fabricator, panels are also created to work with the assembly and manufacturing processe ...


Sophisticated PCB dimensioning tools ensure that the PCB documentation is accurate and complete. Altium Designer includes a comprehensive set of intel ...
The ability to transfer data to and from mechanical CAD tools is crucial in taking an electronic circuit and turning it into a finished product. In ma ...
Both the VRML and IGES formats enjoy extensive support in the 3D mechanical CAD domain. Altium Designer includes a powerful PCB 3D visualization viewe ...
If you don’t want to attach a full imported model for the 3D view, you can simply specify the component height as part of the footprint and use the in ...
Multi-layer boards are the norm today, and so is the need to maximize the areas of solid copper on the board. Altium Designer's new solid polygon mode ...
You can create ‘blowouts’ in polygons with the new polygon cutout object. Complex cutout shapes can be created with the new polygonal cutout, in eithe ...
Polygons are a core design object on a modern PCB. It is not uncommon for a multi-layer board design to include 50 or more polygons, used for power pl ...
Defining split planes is now much easier in Altium Designer, with full support for fully nested split regions and automatic pullback of a user-specifi ...
A standard design technique on today's dense, high-speed boards is to use all spare board space as reference planes, filling them with regions of soli ...
Net impedance, track clearances, signal reflections, path lengths, critical trace widths – all these factors and many more need to be carefully monito ...


Smart Interactive Routing is Altium Designer’s new intelligent interactive routing system. Smart Interactive Routing works with you in an intuitive wa ...
During board design you will often want to move existing routing. This process has been greatly simplified in Altium Designer 6.0. When you drag a tra ...
Schematic-Based Declaration Adding a simple directive to a net at the schematic level will tell the system that this is a member of a differential pa ...
Schematic-Based Declaration Adding a simple directive to a net at the schematic level will tell the system that this is a member of a differential pa ...
Altium Designer 6 saw the addition of Smart Dragging a powerful feature for easily moving existing track segments while maintaining the correct angle ...
A tool that helps strengthen Altium Designer's general editing capabilities is the new Track Slicer. The Track Slicer provides an easy mechanism for c ...
One of the great strengths of an FPGA-based design is that the routing challenge can be moved from the PCB to inside the FPGA, potentially resulting i ...
Matching route lengths is a standard technique for maintaining data integrity in a high-speed digital system and is an essential ingredient of differe ...
ntegrated into Altium Designer, Altium’s state-of-the-art Situs™ Topological Autorouter has been further enhanced with new features. Unlike tradition ...
The autorouter also features a range of commands that allow the selective routing of portions of your board. You can route a single net or connection, ...


Altium Designer's Situs autorouter allows you to customize the routing strategies to include the passes suitable for your board. Situs comes with a se ...
Situs includes built-in routing and fanout strategies for all current component packaging technologies, including QFPs and BGAs, through the use of si ...
Designing an electronic product is a complex process, one that requires a multitude of output files to be generated. To manage these outputs, Altium D ...
The Gerber and ODB++ Setup dialogs have been redesigned and updated making it easier to create and deliver output for designs that contain embedded bo ...
Altium's circuit board CAM system, CAMtastic, bridges the gap between PCB design and manufacture, allowing both board designers and fabrication engine ...
Altium Designer saves you time, and minimizes costly design errors by ensuring your designs are fault-free and completely ready for efficient fabricat ...
Altium Designer can import almost any format CAM data, and output to Gerber, NC drill, ODB++, DXF, bitmap, and a number of other formats. Altium Desig ...
Altium Designer provides dozens of wizards that match aperture descriptions from EDA programs including both current and legacy formats, so that when ...
The aperture list in Altium Designer allows you to preview exactly how your aperture will change as you alter X:Y size, rotation or other parameter va ...
Altium Designer has the capacity to create both regular (drilled) and irregular (routed) holes in the PCB panel. The flashes on a layer may be convert ...


The role of the FPGA in modern electronics is quickly moving from a container for fast hardware, to becoming a platform for complete system design. Re ...
Using SDRAM memory in Altium Designer 6.3 is now as easy as using SRAM or Block RAM memory. The memory controller core has been updated to allow suppo ...
To facilitate the design of FPGAs, Altium Designer works with Altium's unique NanoBoard-NB1 a LiveDesign-enabled development board that allows you to ...
The FPGA Logic Analyzer is a powerful tool in your design verification and debugging arsenal. Using it you can monitor the state of multiple nodes ins ...
The JTAG device viewer has been dramatically enhanced to allow the state of any device to be displayed in the context of its schematic or PCB represen ...
For devices that are not supported in Altium Designer, the device’s BSDL file can be included in the design, allowing the Device Viewer to show the pi ...
Support for the LatticeXP® range of devices has been added. You can now use the Altium Designer environment to work with these powerful and flexible L ...
Embedded tools support for FPGA development is expanded to allow you to take advantage of core technology from your favorite third party vendors – pro ...
When it comes to generating a bit file for programming an FPGA, Altium Designer is a front-end tool controlling third party vendor application through ...
To date, one of the biggest challenges with incorporating an FPGA into the electronic product development process was handling the pin assignment and ...


Enhanced 32-bit Processor Support Altium Designer 6.0 has been radically enhanced in the 32-bit processor area. It is now possible to seamlessly move ...
If the Altera Nios is your embedded processor of choice, then you will be pleased to hear that Altium Designer 6.3 brings full embedded tool chain sup ...
Barcodes are commonly used to tag and identify PCBs. Altium Designer 6.8 allows you to place barcode symbols directly onto a PCB on any layer, allowin ...
Board Cutouts are a new capability for the PCB editor and allow a Region to display a Board Cutout. A new option in the Place » Solid Region dialog al ...
A new PCB editor display option in the View Configurations dialog (accessed from either Design » Board Layers & Colors, or shortcut ‘L’) lets you deci ...
You can create company logos or polygons easily from external sources (i.e., DXF or AutoCAD®) using Define a polygon from selected objects in the PCB ...
Interactive Length Tuning, introduced in Altium Designer 6.7, allows for a more dynamic means of optimizing and controlling net lengths by inserting v ...
Implementing design reuse as a strategy in your development cycle makes a lot of sense – faster turnaround times and higher levels of quality are more ...
Debugging FPGAs can be made easier by having multiplexers with their switching inputs driven by a digital IO instrument. The Crosspoint Switch instru ...
Polygon definition, placement and editing make board design layout more flexible.



Improved zooming, selection and reposition of objects across the editors accelerate the fundamentals of design creation, and increase your productivit ...
Available in the String properties dialog of the PCB editor, new options for inverted text that use TrueType fonts allow you to define various propert ...
Board Insight has been expanded to include new Live Highlighting of the design. Live Highlighting allows you to highlight Nets, Net Classes, Different ...
The generation of design documentation for mechanical layers is easily accomplished with Paste Metafile, new enhanced clipboard metafile capabilities. ...
A new way to setup and generate output jobs to PDF for both PCB and schematic has been introduced with Publish to PDF. Publish to PDF allows you to bu ...
Placement of components during board layout just got a lot easier with new Reposition Selected Components. Launched from Tools » Component Placement » ...
Altium Designer 6.8 introduces a new way of establishing connectivity and reducing schematic complexity – called Signal Harnesses. Signal harnesses ex ...
PCB Visualization includes a number of new dialogs and panels, including an updated View Configurations dialog (accessed from either Design » Board La ...
Appreciating that you may have to change through a large range of snap settings during the board layout process, the Visible and Electrical Grid optio ...
Appreciating that you need efficient editing capabilities for faster turn-around on designs, placing and moving sheet entries has been made more intel ...


Preventing schematic objects on a schematic sheet from being inadvertently moved or edited is ensured with a Locked property through the Schematic Ins ...
Editing the designator and comments in components in schematic libraries can now be done on the fly. A new option to make these visible and interactiv ...
Console IO is a common way of debugging processor systems, and with this release you will be able to type text directly in the Terminal console to sen ...
Today’s designs demand tools that make it easier to view your designs – some things are just easier to see and jump out at you when you see the real t ...
Altium Designer 6.8 now supports Catena software’s popular SIMetrix/SIMPLIS® circuit simulation package. SIMetrix/SIMPLIS is a combination of two inde ...
Altium Designer allows you to create soft processor-based systems inside FPGAs. Previously this was done through the complex job of creating schematic ...
You can now generate FPGA hardware from C source code to gain the performance advantage of dedicated FPGA logic, without using a HDL. Application Spec ...
In PCB dialogs in Altium Designer 6.9, it is now possible to toggle the display values between imperial and metric units. This allows you to quickly c ...
The PCB environment in Altium Designer 6.9 now includes the ability to import STEP component models and Export a STEP file of your design reducing the ...
When a STEP model is loaded, the physical extent of the 3D model is detected to form a bounding cube around it. This is how the overall height and st ...

A STEP model in a 3D body can be easily moved using position STEP model.
Now that you have all your components and their STEP models in full 3D view, you can actually export a STEP file from the PCB layout. Simply choose Fi ...
3D meshed models can take some time to load on complex designs. So to minimize the delays of 3D meshing, multiple core processors have been utilized n ...
Altium Designer 6.9 offers a new feature to monitor power usage across the NanoBoard 2. This feature is only available for the Desktop NanoBoard 2, ve ...