Professional PCB tools continue to evolve

Altium has unveiled a product roadmap for P-CAD, its professional tools for board-layout specialists.

Altium has unveiled a product roadmap for P-CAD, its professional tools for board-layout specialists.

The roadmap is an insight into Altium's ongoing support and development of P-CAD, and demonstrates Altium's commitment to meeting the current and future design needs of its customers.

Today's announcement comes on the heels of Service Pack 1 (SP1) for P-CAD 2004 which answered customer feedback contributed on Altium's P-CAD Forum.

Unlike other providers, Altium gives service packs free of charge to licensed users.

"Altium is committed to the ongoing development of the P-CAD design system", said Nick Martin, founder and Joint CEO, Altium.

"We are presenting our customers with a systematic, approachable and incremental way to realise value from their investments with Altium".

"Altium's P-CAD design system has a proven track record of performance and reliability", said Dan Liggett, Senior CAD Support Specialist, Halliburton Energy Services, a long-term user of P-CAD.

"Today's announcement re-emphasises Altium's commitment to this product - it is listening to the P-CAD community thus staying current with the needs of PCB professionals".

Altium's dedicated team of technical support consultants and developers are committed to delivering and supporting expanded capabilities of P-CAD with new PCB technologies and enhanced features.

SP1 for P-CAD 2004 released on 19th January 2005 is available free of charge for immediate download to all licensed P-CAD 2004 customers from the Altium website.

Service Pack 2 (SP2) for P-CAD is currently in beta testing and expected to release in Q2 of this calendar year, with Service Pack 3 already planned for release in Q3.

"Altium is listening closely to the user forum for the development of P-CAD", said Liggett.

"The company is implementing much of what is suggested with each product development issued".

Altium will deliver a variety of enhancements in SP2 designed to give yet greater power and control over the PCB design process.

Most notable are productivity enhancements such as variants which can now be defined in both schematic and PCB with full ECO support in both directions, as well as the ability to run multiple instances of all P-CAD applications.

The addition of backwards compatibility support facilitates staggered upgrades within companies and more trouble-free interaction between internal and external organisations.

Additionally, efficiency has been greatly improved with layer ordering for printing and important improvements to copper pours.

SP2 will also come with increased routing power due to improvements to glossing and hugging performance, and the Specctra/Situs Exporter.

These, and other enhancements, will be officially announced in Q2 of this calendar year.

P-CAD 2004 is currently offered with bonus technologies that bring additional power and efficiency to the design process.

Altium is further committed to developing these technologies and will provide enhancements via planned service packs and future product releases already in the pipeline.

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