Unified electronics development system is upgraded

Productivity-enhancing features help engineers deal with the ever changing nature of today's mainstream board-level design and its convergence with the wider electronics development process.

Altium has added a raft of new productivity-enhancing features to its Altium Designer unified electronics development system to assist engineers deal with the ever changing nature of today's mainstream board-level design and its convergence with the wider electronics development process.

As other design tool vendors seek to maintain the mystique surrounding high-speed design issues in order to justify the high cost of optional, basic high-speed, high-density board design features, Altium believes that these capabilities should be accessible and useable by all designers working at the physical level today.

With the latest electronic components offering a wide range of fast-switching I/O and dense packaging options, particularly in the latest generation programmable devices, Altium has focused development of its Altium Designer system to include a wide range of high-level interactive and automated tools designed to allow all engineers to assess, manage and troubleshoot signal integrity issues.

Altium Designer now adds interactive net length tuning, enhanced board layer navigation and more powerful polygon area fill placement modes to its arsenal of high-speed, high-density capabilities that already includes interactive differential pair routing, impedance-controlled routing, built-in signal integrity analysis and termination matching, automatic BGA escape routing, automatic FPGA board-level pin optimisation and full PCB-FPGA bidirectional design synchronisation.

These capabilities form part of Altium Designer's advanced yet easy-to-use suite of capabilities aimed to reduce overall design time for high-speed, high-density PCBs, increase the ease and efficiency for working with high-speed digital signals and harness the full power of the latest electronic devices and technologies, such as high-capacity programmable logic, that have made their way onto every day board designs.

"Mainstream engineers today face a completely new set of problems that cannot be solved with design methodologies that were developed to deal with discrete devices and separate design flows".

"And while the challenges associated with high-end programmable device integration and high-speed PCB design are well-acknowledged, most EDA vendors have treated the technology solutions as a premium area", commented Nick Martin, Founder and CEO, Altium.

"However, with sophisticated electronics device technology finding its way into every day design projects, all designers now need access to tools that tackle the proliferation of challenges these converging forces present".

"More importantly they need access to intelligent solutions that are easy to use without the need to reskill or purchase additional high-cost tools".

"These are the barriers we're committed to breaking down with our ongoing development of Altium Designer".

Altium Designer's intelligent interactive routing system has been enhanced with the addition of a new interactive length tuning tool specifically for high-speed designs.

This new feature allows designers to quickly optimise and control net lengths by dynamically inserting "accordion" segments into a track.

Tuning can be manual or rules-driven, and designers can select from a number of amplitude styles available in the system.

This feature combines seamlessly with impedance-controlled, differential pair and multi-trace routing capabilities to give Altium Designer users a comprehensive interactive solution tuned for the high-speed high-density board design projects that are being significantly impacted by modern day programmable devices.

Board navigation has been made more efficient with enhanced control and display over PCB layers, and will deliver significantly enhanced productivity when moving around large complex designs.

The placement and editing of polygons has been streamlined to make the creation of large copper-filled areas fast and intuitive.

Significant improvements have also been made to the way components and libraries are identified and used within the system to deliver greater levels of user control and flexibility.

Creating and delivering output for designs that contain embedded board arrays has been improved with added intelligence for identifying layer stackup violations.

In addition, enhanced output dialogs for Gerber and ODB++ now makes it even easier for users to make decisions about whether to proceed with output or resolve compatibility violations.

These board-level system enhancements, and more, are now available with the latest software update for Altium Designer 6 - Altium Designer 6.7.

All Altium Designer 6 licence holders can download this update for free.

Altium Designer 6 is available for purchase through Altium's sales and support centres worldwide.

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