Substantial upgrade for PCB design

Service Pack 2 for P-CAD 2004 is a substantial upgrade, with over 130 new features and enhancements designed to give greater power and control over the PCB design process.

Altium has released Service Pack 2 for P-CAD 2004, its PCB design system for layout professionals.

Service Pack 2 (SP2) is a substantial upgrade, with over 130 new features and enhancements designed to give greater power and control over the PCB design process.

It is available as a free download to all existing P-CAD 2004 customers.

SP2 includes productivity enhancements such as variants, which can now be defined in both schematic and PCB with full ECO support in both directions.

Variants can be created and edited by renaming, modifying the description, adding or removing components, and modifying the attributes of components to be placed with the variant.

SP2 also includes the ability to run multiple instances of all P-CAD applications - PCB, schematic, and library manager/executive.

Furthermore, SP2 provides backwards compatibility support that facilitates staggered upgrades within companies and more trouble-free interaction between internal and external organisations.

Efficiency has been greatly improved with layer ordering for printing, and SP2 includes important improvements to copper pours.

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

In addition, enhancements were made to P-CAD 2004 Bonus Technologies, including Altium Designer's Situs Topological Autorouter, which now recognises and uses class-to-class rules provided by P-CAD and handles P-CAD layer names with spaces in them.

Clearance rules are now interpreted correctly, with pad and via rules broken out into separate rules when necessary.

Free pads are no longer converted to vias.

There is support for pad styles with zero height and width on top and bottom layers, layer rules from P-CAD, and prerouted fanouts in components.

Split plane nets are now also handled and assigned correctly.

"Service Pack 2 is a significant upgrade for our loyal P-CAD customers", said Nick Martin, founder and CEO, Altium.

"We listened closely to the P-CAD community, addressed their issues, and are excited to make this service pack available today".

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