Altium has announced the release of an update to their flagship PCB design platform, Altium Designer 16.1. This update continues the company's core focus on providing engineers with the most efficient PCB design platform with several new features that enhance design documentation and high-speed design workflows. Altium Designer 16.1 is available now as a free upgrade for all existing Altium Subscription customers, and can be accessed via the Altium Products Download page.
"Electronic designs are shaping the future of human connectivity and enable us to create innovative solutions to the world's most pressing problems," said Matthew Schwaiger, VP Global Customer Success at Altium. "Altium Designer 16.1 continues our focus of providing the most efficient and unified design environment available that allows engineers to transform ideas into reality without their design tool acting as a barrier to their creativity."
Connecting Design and Documentation Workflows
While documentation is a critical element of every post-design process, engineers typically find themselves struggling with limited, 3rd-party documentation tools that lack a connection to their original design data. With Draftsman™ in Altium Designer 16.1, PCB designers can easily create and update documentation without ever leaving their design workspace. Draftsman enables PCB designers to:
- Stay at their most efficient by creating and updating assembly documentation without ever having to learn another tool or workflow.
- Easily communicate with manufacturing with easy-to-use markup and drawing object tools, all available in the same familiar design interface.
- Provide data-rich details on board layouts with detailed perspectives, flexible board layout views, and expressive call-outs.
"Documentation has always been one of those tedious yet necessary tasks in every engineer's post-design process," said Alexey Sabunin, Altium Designer Product Manager. "With Draftsman, we've gone beyond the basic limitations of the traditional documentation process with intelligently linked design and documentation data, allowing engineers to focus on communicating their design details right the first time."
In addition to Draftsman, Altium Designer 16.1 also includes several new productivity-focused features that allows a PCB designer to easily complete their high-speed designs and mechanical enclosure verifications with:
- Precise 3D Measurements - Engineers can precisely measure board layouts in Native 3D and ensure a precise fit with existing mechanical enclosures.
- USB 3.0 Support - Engineers can easily design accurate and high-speed board layouts with technology-aware configurations for USB 3.0.
- Performance enhancements - Engineers can confidently complete their designs with several platform stability and user interface enhancements.
