Unified environment eases design translation

The latest Altium Designer delivers a number of new features targeted at accelerating the design process, and upgrades translation capabilities from other systems such as OrCAD and PADS.

The latest release of Altium Designer, the industry's only unified electronic product development solution, delivers a number of new features targeted at accelerating the design process, and includes upgraded translation capabilities for accurate, efficient and cost-effective migration to Altium Designer from other systems such as OrCAD and PADS.

This ensures all engineers can take full advantage of the latest electronics technology, such as high-capacity programmable devices, and the new design possibilities that a unified development environment enables.

Today's programmable technology provides system designers with a whole new range of options in terms of design methodology that allow for greater flexibility, lower production cost and faster time to market.

In this environment, successful design teams are finding that the traditional roles of board designers, FPGA designers and software designers are changing and the ability to adapt to these changes reaps major rewards.

Altium Designer's unified approach enables all design engineers to take maximum advantage of the options provided by "soft" design.

Altium Designer 6.3 is designed to make the transition from board designer or embedded designer to 'super systems designer' easy and effective.

"Design teams are beginning to understand that the future of electronic product development lies in utilising the potential of programmable device technology to accelerate hardware and software design".

"This means having the tools to approach design in a new and different way", said Nick Martin, founder and CEO, Altium.

"This latest release is all about ensuring they have the capabilities necessary to help them accurately migrate their existing design data, and the significant investment this represents, into Altium Designer".

"We want to make this process easy so there are no barriers to adopting the new design methodologies made possible by a unified design system".

Unlike other vendors who charge a significant premium for migration consulting services, Altium's focus is on delivering automated, high-performance conversion tools within the Altium Designer system to allow customers to manage the transition process themselves.

This allows them to move to Altium Designer at their own pace and lowers the total cost of ownership of the system.

Nick Haman, Senior Electronic Engineer from HepaHope, said: "Other vendors could not offer us a complete package for PCB layout and FPGA development".

"Their only offer was to either sell us or help us select the individual components and then work with us to integrate them all together".

"Altium Designer not only met all of our requirements but offered a single unified package for what the other vendors were charging for a single component".

Altium Designer 6.3 features a number of new and enhanced features to help design teams make a seamless transition from a number of legacy point-tool design products to Altium Designer.

This includes a new PADS library importer which enables users to seamlessly bring in PADS footprint (pattern) libraries to Altium Designer.

ASCII library files up to PADS PowerPCB version 2005 (SP0) can be imported.

Altium Designer's existing OrCAD importer, which handles OrCAD Layout, OrCAD Capture and OrCAD PCB and schematic library files, has been enhanced in 6.3 to support OrCAD design components that include simulation data.

This includes both simulation-ready schematics and schematic libraries.

Altium Designer 6.3 also features a new unified PADS/OrCAD importer that creates integrated libraries from a combination of OrCAD schematic symbols and PADS footprints (patterns).

This importer also includes a Wizard that supports the import of OrCAD schematics and PADS PCB documents into a single Altium Designer project in one operation.

In addition to easing the migration process for OrCAD and PADS design files, Altium's own P-CAD customers will benefit from similar enhancements in this release.

Altium Designer's Import Wizard translates complete P-CAD designs, including schematics, PCB layout, and library files.

The addition of an option to use P-CAD schematic and PCB hotkeys in 6.3 makes for an easier and more familiar entry into Altium Designer's unified design environment for P-CAD customers.

Altium Designer 6.3 also includes a host of features that accelerate design for current users.

Those installing the 6.3 update will receive a significant boost to graphics performance in the PCB editor with a new hardware accelerated graphics engine that makes use of Microsoft's latest DirectX technologies.

With this technology, Altium Designer users can expect speed increases of around 20x when zooming and panning, making the redraw speed on even the largest design documents effectively instantaneous.

It also introduces native support for 3D rendering directly in the PCB editor - a first in the industry - opening the door to superior "real-time" design visualisation.

"The lack of support and innovation most EDA vendors give to engineers working in the non-IC design space never ceases to amaze me", continued Martin.

"Making the best possible use of all available technologies and making the benefits of these technologies accessible to every engineer, designer and developer has always been our mission".

"This not only includes harnessing the benefits of the latest in electronics design technologies, such as high-capacity programmable devices, but also the power of the desktop itself".

"Our support for multiple monitors and now the use of DirectX technology are prime examples of this".

The Altium Designer 6.3 release is free for all Altium Designer 6 licence holders and will be available in June for immediate download.

An evaluation copy is available from the Altium website.

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