Professional PCB design suite comes up to date

Altium has released Service Pack 3 (SP3) for P-CAD 2004, its PCB design system for layout professionals.

Altium has released Service Pack 3 (SP3) for P-CAD 2004, its PCB design system for layout professionals.

Available as a free download to existing licensed P-CAD 2004 customers, SP3 is a substantial upgrade, with over 160 new features and enhancements that offer greater ease of use and flexibility in the PCB design process.

The development of new features and enhancements available within SP3 reinforces Altium's commitment to ongoing support and development of P-CAD, with the focus for this Service Pack on strengthening the performance of the system and increasing value to customers.

This is reflected in productivity enhancements in many areas including variants, layer stack up and configuration of options.

Additionally a significant upgrade was made to the P-CAD Ties Viewlogic/ePD interface, which now supports eProduct Designer (ePD) 2004 SP1.

The Ties utility allows the transfer of electrical design information between the Viewlogic/ePD CAE design tools and P-CAD's tools, and offers cross-probing plus forward/backward annotation.

The PADS to P-CAD translator has also been updated to handle non-English characters, enabling support for foreign languages, as well as supporting newer versions of PADS (up to and including version 2005.1).

The number of component libraries included in P-CAD 2004 has been significantly increased with SP3; the 19,000 new components bring the total components available to almost 80,000.

These components, developed according to the ISO9001:2000 standard, significantly reduce the need to create a component from scratch, saving time and effort.

P-CAD 2004 SP3 also includes an increased number of CAM file export options.

P-CAD users can now output an IPC-D-356A formatted net list.

This popular format includes netlist connectivity data, blind and buried via information, and also differentiates between through-hole vias and free pads.

Furthermore, P-CAD 2004 SP3 makes it easier and faster to setup new designs.

Default settings for such items as apertures, design rules, grid settings, and pad styles can now be stored and applied automatically to new designs.

The library executive has also been enhanced; a new "save to file" option has been added that allows incomplete data to be saved to a separate file and reloaded to continue work at another time.

"We are pleased to announce the release of Service Pack 3 for P-CAD 2004, with an abundance of customer driven enhancements", said Nick Martin, founder and CEO, Altium.

"This service pack reinforces our commitment to P-CAD and continues our promise of delivering expanded capabilities that meet the current and future needs of our P-CAD customers".

P-CAD 2004 SP3 is available free of charge for immediate download to all licensed P-CAD 2004 customers.

P-CAD 2004 also includes bonus technologies that encompass Altium Designer's Situs Topological Autorouter, CAMtastic and mixed-signal circuit simulation.

These bonus technologies compliment and enhance the capabilities of the P-CAD system and offer additional design power to P-CAD customers.

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