“We realised that connectivity management is the most important thing to watch. One of the problems happens when header connectors are reversed into place when the boards are mated and the pin assignments turn out to be mismatched because the part library has one of the connector numbered incorrectly. “People have been doing multi-board for some time but when you design with a conventional PCB tool, there can be alignment and connectivity issues.” More and more of them have multiple circuit boards just to conform to the shape of the product,” explained Jordan. “Multi-board is something that just about every designer has to do now. “The flagship new feature is multi-board assembly,” Jordan said, noting that the graphics improvements help performance when showing the 3D interactions between boards in an assembly. Image A multiboard assembly and enclosure in Altium Designer 18 In common with other PCB tools, the router will handle tasks such as matching the trace lengths of differential pairs by creating serpentine paths automatically. The rewrite has come with an overhaul of the user interface, which also takes advantage of the workstation’s graphics processing unit (GPU) to speed up redraws, and changes to the ActiveRoute interactive router. What stays is the support for pin-swapping “as it’s part of PCB design”, Jordan said. In the move to version 18, Altium decided to drop much of the FPGA-design support it had offered previously on the basis that almost all teams use the implementation tools that are provided by the IC vendors.

They are moving either to Ubuntu or MacOS and we need to provide the tools on those platforms.” A lot of engineering pros are using MacBooks now. “OS X is a higher priority because the engineering desktop is changing. “Now cross-platform delivery is possible,” he said. Version 18 involved refactoring on the more widely supported language C#.

Mentor now scales Xpedition’s multi-board PCB capabilitiesĪltium has rewritten its PCB-design software to improve graphics performance and provide the opportunity to port to non-Windows operating systems such as OS X.īen Jordan, senior manager of product marketing, said prior versions of Altium Designer were written in the platform-specific language Delphi, which also limited it to running as a 32bit application under Windows.Devgan plans for optimization through machine learning.

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