Designer software

Altium has introduced technology that, for the first time, lets electronics designers fit their boards into enclosures in real time, in 3D and without guesswork.

With this, they can eliminate the trial-and-error, ‘wait-and-see’ ECAD-MCAD problems.

Being able to manipulate the enclosure and make design decisions in real time, during the electronics design process, is a step forward in unifying broader product design processes with electronics design.

It’s now easy for electronics designers to collaborate directly with their mechanical design peers.

Building on the company’s earlier, ground-breaking real-time 2D PCB visualisation, it’s now possible to link to external STEP models from within Altium Designer to bring, for example, the model of the casing into the PCB design.

By using the non-proprietary STEP 3D file format as a mechanism, the company allows ECAD-MCAD collaboration without forcing organisations to purchase integration add-ons or use a specific mechanical CAD package.

The latest version of the unified electronics design delivers features that cover all areas of electronics design.

At the board level, PCB-level pin swapping, auto-optimisation, BGA fan out and system-wide differential pair support make using FPGAs on a board so much easier and effective, even for those who aren’t PCB design experts.

A routing engine not only makes board design faster and easier for specialist PCB designers; when combined with the general editing environment and real-time 3D PCB visualisation capabilities, it also lets those less experienced in board design turn out workable boards faster and easier.

C programmers, as well as creating application code within Altium Designer, can now create hardware directly using their existing C coding skills and link this hardware into the wider FPGA-based system.

The entire programmable design process can be done by software or board-level designers without any specific FPGA design expertise.