Altium Designer 08 release - The next generation of Altium Designer
is here!

A unified electronic product development solution
Altium Designer is the world's first and only unified electronic product development system that allows engineers to take a design from concept to completion within a single application. Altium Designer brings together hardware, software and programmable hardware development within a unified environment that allows all aspects of an electronic product to be designed and managed within a single system. This, combined with modern design data management capabilities allows Altium Designer to transcend traditional tool boundaries, opening up new design possibilities that allow more intelligent electronic products to be created faster than ever before.

Altium Designer allows you to harness the potential that exists within today’s electronics technology, giving you design innovation within a unified environment for both today’s and tomorrow’s development needs.

The Innovation Station
The Innovation Station combines the award-winning Altium Designer unified electronics design software with the Altium NanoBoard range of reconfigurable hardware platforms. This approach puts device intelligence at the core of the design process. A complete, unified electronics design environment that unlocks a new way to create and bring to market intelligent, connected electronic products.

The Altium Innovation Station lets you design without limits, from pure device intelligence, with no electronics hardware design required, all the way through to full, custom electronics hardware. You choose the implementation option that best suits your application, target market and technical and business needs.

Deploying Altium Designer with confidence
Deploy Altium Designer across your organization with confidence: the only unified electronics design solution; rich with new features and functions; and with new versions every six months, to keep you in touch with technology.

Whether you work on your own, as part of a small design team, or within a large corporation, Altium provides a flexible set of license options that allow you to put the right capabilities on every desktop. Altium’s license options offer the alternatives of accessing Altium Designer’s core features which allow you to exploit the potential offered by today’s large-capacity programmable devices; or Altium Designer’s extended features, which embrace the core feature set and extends it to include full custom board design and manufacturing capabilities.

Board level design
Altium Designer’s board-level design capabilities allow you to fully define and implement the physical elements of your design. The powerful rules-driven design, layout and editing environment gives you full control over all aspects of your design in an intuitive and productive environment.

The printed circuit board connects together the discrete components, connectors and other hardware that form the physical platform of the design. With increasing component densities, faster signal speeds and transitions, and tighter manufacturing tolerances, successful board design today, more than ever, relies on design systems that unify design definition and physical layout.

In Altium Designer our proven strength in board-level system design has been unified at the platform level with support for programmable design within an FPGA environment. This provides a fully unified product development system that can be deployed across all elements of the electronic product design process.

Altium Designer’s board-level design capabilities are second to none, and allow you to fully define and implement all physical elements of your design.

Unified design environment : Altium Designer unifies the process of board design by providing
a single application environment for capturing design data, verifying the performance of the circuit, and designing the PCB.

Develop boards that are correct by design : Altium Designer's powerful rules-driven design,
layout and editing environment gives you full control over all aspects of the physical implementation of your circuit.

Bring structure to the design process : Altium Designer’s schematic editor facilitates the
capture of designs of any complexity by supporting a hierarchical approach to design.

Layout and route the PCB : Altium Designer preserves the hierarchy and functional partitioning
of the design into the physical realm, making it easy to scope physical constraints to drive the layout and routing process.

High speed design support : Altium Designer supports high-speed design with targeted design
rules, complete system-level support for managing differential signals, and integrated signal integrity analysis.

Mixed-signal circuit simulation : Altium Designer’s mixed-signal circuit simulation is a unified
part of the capture process and is fully integrated with the schematic editing environment.

Managing libraries
Altium Designer provides comprehensive component data management and library resources that allow you to maintain control over part usage, regardless of the size or demands of your organization.

Choosing an obsolete or out-of-stock component can lead to lengthy production delays and cost overruns. These types of problems are not easy to identify during design and may not be picked up until the project is in the manufacturing stage. This can be disastrous for the overall success of the product.

Altium Designer provides comprehensive component data management and information resources that allow you to maintain control over parts usage, regardless of the size or demands of your organization.

Manage component information : Altium Designer gives you complete management of your
component information to help you to maintain control over how parts are used in your designs.

Implement a database-driven library system : Altium Designer's database library capabilities
allow you to take full control over the management of component data.

Design with integrated libraries : Altium Designer's integrated library format allows you to
control the deployment of stand-alone component sources and manage component data.

Find components easily : Altium Designer's flexible library search features ensure that you
can quickly and easily locate components from even the largest parts collections.

Generate full library documentation : With Altium Designer you can quickly and easily generate
a comprehensive report detailing all the components in a specified library.

Design to manufacture
Altium Designer smooths the transition from design to manufacture by providing a single environment for managing design data, and allows you to actively manage the generation and verification of all manufacturing data.

The smooth transition from design to manufacture plays a crucial role in the success of an electronic product. Delays in component procurement and miscommunication with manufacturers can lead to delays and cost overruns. Your product can be late to market, or miss the boat altogether. Altium Designer helps bridge the gap between design and manufacture, and allows you to actively manage the generation and verification of all manufacturing data.

By providing a single design environment for managing design data, Altium Designer saves time and minimizes costly design errors during the flow from design to manufacture. You can work efficiently with your manufacturing partners to ensure your manufacturing files are fault-free and completely ready for efficient fabrication and assembly.

Link design to manufacture : Altium Designer provides complete manufacturing file verification
and editing in a unified design environment, allowing you to load and inspect all manufacturing data generated by the system.

Centralize output file generation : To manage output documents Altium Designer includes a
specialized output job document (OutJob) that can be added to a project to centralize output generation.

Output a full range of fabrication and assembly files : Altium Designer provides a wide choice
of outputs to allow you to generate appropriate files for any manufacturing requirements.

Generate accurate Bills of Materials : Altium Designer allows you to completely configure the
information and format of Bills of Materials (BOM), and generate BOM listings in a variety of formats.

Document your design : With Altium Designer you can precisely define the mix of PCB layers
you want to print, set the scaling and orientation, and see exactly how it will look on the page before you print it.

Interface to mechanical CAD : Altium Designer offers extensive interface support for a wide
range of mechanical CAD tools.

Collaborate by sharing your design data : Altium Designer supports secure collaboration with all stakeholders by providing a powerful Smart PDF wizard and a free Viewer Edition.

Harnessing programmable devices
Altium Designer’s unified product development environment allows you fully exploit the potential offered by today's large-capacity programmable devices. You can work within an easily updateable soft realm where you can change software and hardware with equal ease.

In a typical electronic product today, much of the ‘intelligence’ is embodied in the embedded software running on a microprocessor. Consider then the impact of the emergence of low-cost, high-capacity programmable devices such as FPGAs. These allow the intelligent portions of the design to encompass not only software in the traditional sense, but the soft-wired blocks of hardware implemented inside an FPGA.

Altium Designer is unique in that it allows you to change the way you think about developing electronic products and fully exploit the potential offered by today's large-capacity programmable devices. By unifying FPGA design and software development and using the programmable fabric of an FPGA as a system platform, you can work within an easily updateable soft realm where you can change software and hardware with equal ease.

The rise of embedded intelligence : The recent emergence of low-cost, high-capacity
programmable devices such as FPGAs is redefining the boundaries between software and hardware, and leading to shift in how designers think about adding intelligence to their products.

Design using soft-wired components : With Altium Designer you can take ready-to-use FPGA-
based components and wire them together at the block level within Altium Designer's schematic editor to create the circuit design.

Work with processors and embedded software : Altium Designer allows you to easily work
with programmable devices using the same skills and convenience currently enjoyed at the board level.

Download and interact ‘live’ with your design : Altium Designer allows you to connect live to
the programmable elements within your design, and interact with the system under development.

Unified FPGA-PCB design
It is crucial for design productivity that programmable device development is fully synchronized with the physical design process. Altium Designer’s unified design environment provides automatic propagation of design data between FPGA design projects and the board design that incorporates them, allowing concurrent FPGA-PCB development

Large scale programmable devices are increasingly finding their way into mainstream electronic development. They open up new design possibilities and bring significant benefits to the design process, allowing functional complexity to be moved from hardwired devices into the programmable realm. Today it is crucial for design productivity that the implemtation of these devices is fully unified with the physical design process.

In Altium Designer our proven strength in board-level system design has been unified at the platform level with support for programmable design within an FPGA environment.

Unifying FPGA development with board-level design : Altium Designer solves the problems of
working with large-scale programmable devices by unifying the development of FPGA design projects with the board design that incorporates them.

Concurrent FPGA and PCB design : Altium Designer facilitates complete FPGA-PCB co-design
and enables rapid development of FPGA-based applications.

Debug devices at the physical level : With Altium Designer, software can be easily changed
and updated throughout the development cycle and can be debugged interactively on the target execution platform.

Managing the electronic development process
The development of electronic products no longer involves independent processes. Altium Designer unifies the entire design process and allows you to manage all aspects of development within a single, unified design flow environment.

The design of the physical platform, the implementation of functionality in programmable devices and the development of the software elements of the design are no longer independent processes. They must now be efficiently managed as a single design flow in order to achieve a successful outcome.

Altium Designer unifies the entire design process and allows you to manage all aspects of development within a single design environment, and gives you a unified project and document management infrastructure that supports the convergence of traditionally separate design disciplines.

Bringing unity to the design process : Altium Designer brings efficiency and enhanced
productivity to electronic product development by providing platform-level unification of all design processes,

Managing all projects within a unified environment : With Altium Designer you have the ability to
create and work with all of the different projects that go to make up your final product design within a single environment, which brings design efficiencies not possible with traditional point tools.

Managing all your design documents : Altium Designer's Storage Manager allows you to view
and manage the physical storage of all design documents associated with a project, and seamlessly work with version control systems.

Graphically compare PCB and schematic documents : Altium Designer includes a powerful
graphical differencing engine that allows you to compare file versions on a spatial basis, as well as on the connectivity level.