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Industry Summary Articles

Wednesday, February 25, 2015

Altium Announces Updates to Flagship High-Speed PCB Design Tool

Altium Limited has announced the next update to its flagship PCB design tool, Altium Designer. Altium Designer 15.1 will introduce several new features for improved design productivity, documentation outputs, and high-speed design efficiency.

“We’re pushing productivity and high-speed design features further than we ever have before,” said Jason Hingston, CTO at Altium. “With Altium Designer 15.1, we remain committed as ever to expanding our core expertise in making the most productive and efficient design software for the complexity demanded from today’s electronic designs and the needs of engineers.”

Expanding An Existing Foundation

The new features in Altium Designer 15.1 are adding to an existing foundation set in place with the initial release of Altium Designer 15, which focused on improvements to the high-speed design process. In addition, Altium Designer 15.1 also enhances the core philosophy of the software, with a continued focus on improved design productivity and efficiency. Expanding upon these two existing foundations, Altium Designer 15.1 is adding:

Improved Support for xSignals

The release of Altium Designer 15.0 provided a set of features to address the growing complexity of high-speed design. To enhance the productivity of the high-speed design process even further, a wizard for xSignals that helps save time on configuring length-matching rules has been added. 

Expanded Rigid-Flex Support

The addition of bikini coverlay support for rigid-flex designs allows users to easily add support layers to flexible designs that can be viewed in 3D and configured with user-specific materials.

New Output Documentation Options

The introduction of 3D PDF output documentation in Altium Designer 15.1 makes it easy for anyone on the team, designer or not, to view a PCB design in 3D from any compatible PDF viewer.

New Design Re-Use Features

Additional design re-use tools are being added for increased productivity when managing pads and vias as reusable libraries in PCB designs. Padstacks will allow a user to define templates for different sized pads and vias in specific groups being used on a board, saving designers time by no longer having to define pad and via sizes individually.

This is but a small preview of all the powerful productivity, documentation, and high-speed design features being added in Altium Designer 15.1. A full listing of all the new features in 15.1 will be released in the coming weeks. 

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