Building the physical platform

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 integrated at the platform level with support for programmable design within an FPGA environment. This provides a complete and unified 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.

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

Project management features

Projects can be kept well structured, up-to-date and on-track with Altium Designer's enhanced project management capabilities. This one intuitive system manages versions, revisions, linked information and project history for an entire project.

Strong project management features are essential to manage the rapid development and revision of electronic products. Altium Designer keeps the design team in the picture with features that include full integration with popular Version Control Systems, a built-in document history management system, powerful new revision comparison engines that detect physical differences in schematic and PCB files, and component-to-document linking.

Project-centric approach

With Altium Designer, all files, links and settings are stored as part of a project. When reloaded, projects are therefore ready to go without the need to restore a matching setup configuration.

Altium Designer's new consolidated approach to projects gives more than the ability to see the schematics and their PCB files together. Error checking settings, design transfer settings, output generation and links between components and a company database are all defined and stored as part of the project.

Design Environment

To maximize your productivity as a designer the environment that you work in must be intuitive and flexible, and be in step with best practices for PC-based design tools. Altium Designer’s user interface has been designed with a focus on ease-of-use, intuitive control, improved productivity, and consistency of interface across all editors.

Whether you work alone or as part of a large design team, Altium Designer provides the most productive board-level design environment available on the Windows desktop.

The DXP environment makes extensive use of customizable panels to organize and give you access to the various tools and features available in a particular editor. Workspace panels can be docked, floated, or set to automatically hide when not in use. Floating panels and toolbars will automatically fade out of the way when you are performing any editing in the workspace.

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. The system helps you create boards that are correct by design, and ensures the integrity of design data and compliance with all design constraints at every stage of the design process from capture through to board production.

Full constraints-driven design

Altium Designer provides a comprehensive set of design rules that cover all aspects of the board design process. From electrical and routing constraints through to signal integrity, Altium Designer’s hierarchical rules system provides the power and flexibility to completely control all crucial parameters in the design.

Precise design rule scoping

Instead of a set of fixed, pre-defined rule scopes, Altium Designer features a flexible query system to define the objects that a rule is applied to. This gives precise control over rule targeting, and makes the process of constraining your design fast and efficient.

You can also define multiple rules of the same type targeted to different sets of objects, providing hierarchical constraint definition. To know where rules are applied you can navigate through the defined rules and have Altium Designer highlight the objects targeted, or simply right-click on an object to find out exactly which rules are applicable to it.

Maintaining the accuracy of source schematics

PCB re-spins cost time and money, so finding design errors early is essential. Altium Designer introduces the concept of project compilation to the capture process to ensure the integrity and consistency of the source files within a project.

At any time in the design process you can compile your schematic project, which is also automatically compiled before any critical design actions. In this way the system ensures that you are alerted to errors and potential design problems as you design. With Altium Designer you can capture your application with the confidence that your projects will be correct by design, and that the integrity of your source files is constantly maintained throughout the design process.

Complete design synchronization

Altium Designer’s unified environment supports full and automatic synchronization of your entire board project, and allows you to efficiently manage the flow of changes between the PCB design and the source schematics.

Synchronization is bi-directional, so you can manage changes made at both the schematic and PCB level within a single operation. You have full control over the direction in which changes are propagated, and you can fully document any changes by generating engineering change order reports during synchronization.

Navigating design data

Altium Designer brings clarity to design navigation with a variety of innovative ways to filter, display and edit your design data.

You can interactively browse through components, nets or violations within schematic or PCB documents, and drill down through the hierarchy to highlight the individual primitives associated with objects. With Altium Designer your cursor becomes an interactive data mining tool. As you hover the cursor within the PCB design, essential information is displayed about the underlying objects.

The Altium Designer schematic editor facilitates the capture of designs of any complexity by supporting a hierarchical approach to design. This allows you take both a top-down and bottom-up view of the overall circuit, and to easily break the design into functional blocks.

Schematic wiring

Altium Designer includes a raft of schematic wiring enhancements to accelerate the process of wiring up the design. These include:

• automatic wire cutting when a component is placed on top of a wire
• a new break wire tool, ideal when you need to modify the existing wiring
• an ‘always drag’ mode to maintain wire connectivity as components are repositioned
• automatic port and sheet entry direction, based on how the net is being driven
• graphical display of the pin direction, making it easier to read the circuit functionality
• optional wiring crossover display modes, ensuring there is no ambiguity in the schematic printouts
• auto dimming and zooming modes that make wiring at any zoom level fast and accurate.

Handling repeated circuit elements

Many designs include extensive blocks of repeated circuitry. Cutting and pasting circuit segments achieves the overall design structure, but makes editing difficult. You need to make repeated edits to change the circuit or channel structure. Altium Designer has an extensive array of capabilities in this area, significantly streamlining repetitive design tasks.

Windows clipboard support

Working back and forth between different Windows applications should not be hard, and with Altium Designer Windows clipboard support it isn’t. Circuit fragments can be copied and pasted directly into the handbook open in a word processor, just as easily as component and outline details can be copied from the PCB into the test instructions.

Paste reports directly into schematic

You can now copy and paste from Excel (or any other Windows clipboard source) directly onto a schematic sheet. This gives you the ability to open a spreadsheet, select and copy a region and then paste the information into a schematic sheet. All layout and formatting applied to the spreadsheet is retained, greatly improving the quality of documentation generated from the system.

Smart Paste - a new dimension to the clipboard

Smart Paste allows a group of objects to be selected and pasted as objects of a different type.  For example, a series of net labels can be selected and pasted as ports or Windows clipboard text can be pasted as sheet entries. Sophisticated data transformations can also be performed such as pasting a bus net-label as the equivalent series of individual wire labels, or the reverse case of a series of matching wire labels as a single bus label.

Multi-channel design

With Altium Designer you can handle repeated circuitry intelligently within the schematic hierarchy. You can reference a single subsheet multiple times by including a repeat parameter in the referencing sheet symbol. When you compile your project, Altium Designer will automatically instantiate the repeated blocks or channels programmatically. Because the hierarchy is maintained within the project throughout the capture process, you can edit the source schematic at any time and recompile to propagate the edits to all repeated blocks or change the number of repeated instances. As you move through to board design, Altium Designer will automatically propagate channel instantiation through to the PCB layout. This allows you to layout one channel and then copy the placement and routing across the remaining channels.

Snippets and unions

Altium Designer allows you to create and store design "snippets". Any number of items in a Schematic can be grouped together into a "union" and then stored as a "snippet" for reuse in the future. Snippets are displayed in the Snippets panel as thumbnail images and are organized into repositories. Each schematic Snippet is stored as a standard schematic file which can be reused in the future and shared with other users. Snippets can be exploded back to free objects if required and individual objects can still be edited when they are in this form within the document. Text, images and source code can be stored as snippets as well. This is useful for storing commonly used text and images like copyright information etc.

Schematic hierarchy management

Working with multi-sheet, hierarchical designs is effortless with Altium Designer. There is an impressive array of commands provided to streamline the task of creating sub-sheets, parent sheets and maintaining integrity between the various levels in your design.

Component to document linking

Along with enhanced component-to-database linking, Altium Designer offers a new approach to linking from a component to reference information such as datasheets or application notes. Component parameters that allow direct linking of documents such as PDF files or web-based URLs can now be added. Two parameter types are available: a help link, which opens the target document when the F1 key pressed while hovering over the component on a sheet, or multiple document links that appear in the popup menu when right-clicking on a component.

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.

Complete interactive routing system

A large portion of the board design effort is spent on routing the connections. As board real estate shrinks and component and pin densities increase, the routing challenge becomes tougher. You need to be able to squeeze the most from every square millimeter of routing space.

Altium Designer provides you with a complete interactive routing solution that combines rules-driven, versatile interactive routing modes, predictive track placement and dynamically optimized connectivity to allow you to efficiently tackle any routing challenge.

Versatile routing modes

In tight spots you can simply hug existing tracks and Altium Designer will enforce the defined clearance constraints, preventing you from creating rule violations. You can also switch modes and Altium Designer will push existing tracks out of the way, under full design rule compliance, to make room. To re-route a track simply route the new path and Altium Designer will automatically remove redundant copper, making design rework fast and efficient.

To support routing to large BGA devices, Altium Designer includes an automatic BGA escape routing function that will fanout and place stub tracks on all used pins of the device to make connection paths accessible around the periphery of the component. The mix of interactive routing features in Altium Designer provides a complete and unified interactive routing environment that allows you to quickly and efficiently tackle any board routing challenge.

Effortless Layer Stackup

The PCB layer stackup can be configured and visualized in the Layer Stack Manager. PCB physical properties can be specified, these values are used if you choose to use the interactive impedance-controlled routing capabilities or perform a signal integrity analysis.

Copper Plane Support

Multi-layer boards are the norm today, and so is the need to maximize the areas of solid copper on the board. Altium Designer provides fully editable polygonal-shaped copper region objects as well as comprehensive solid plane and split plane capabilities.

PCB Placement Rooms

The rectangular or multi-sided placement rooms are ideal for defining placement areas for related components. Rooms can be defined automatically for each sheet in the schematic, and there are also a number of tools for quickly defining rooms in the PCB editor. Rooms can be autorouted individually, and for multi-channel designs, the placement and routing of one room can be copied to other rooms.

Flip and edit the board

Today's double-sided SMD placement provides a number of challenges for board designers. Altium Designer has the ability to flip the board over at any time during the layout process. While flipped the full array of editing, routing and placement commands continue to work just the same as when viewing the board from the front.

Preserve track angles while editing

While editing existing tracks, Altium Designer allows dragging to maintain the angle of adjoining segments. This, coupled with some significant enhacements in this area, signficiantly streamlines the track editing process.

Board insight

A complex-multi layer board makes for a visually dense and often difficult to interpret workspace. The new Board Insight system makes it easier to view and understand the objects in your design. The Board Insight system is an integrated set of features developed to meet your view management needs. Board Insight includes an Insight Lens, heads-up cursor information, floating graphical views, simplified net highlighting, and enhanced net labeling on objects.

Autorouting support

Altium Designer comes equipped with Altium’s Situs Topological Autorouter engine, which is fully integrated into the PCB editor. The Situs engine uses topological analysis to map the board space. Topological mapping provides greater flexibility in route path determination and allows non-orthogonal routing corridors to be more efficiently exploited.

Altium Designer also includes full bi-directional support for the SPECCTRA autorouter. During export you can automatically preserve existing board routing, control the mapping of Altium Designer via rules to SPECCTRA pad stacks, and propagate net classes to SPECCTRA to allow efficient generation of class-based routing constraints.

Altium Designer supports high-speed design with targeted design rules, complete system-level support for managing differential signals, and integrated signal integrity analysis. Altium Designer’s extensive rules system allows you to create constraints targeted towards high-speed design and differential signalling.

Working with differential signals

Differential signaling is being increasingly used in mainstream board design – particularly where programmable devices are used. FPGA vendors are including extensive LVDS capabilities in even their lower-cost device ranges because it not only improves reflection noise, but also electromagnetic interference (EMI) and power consumption. Altium Designer provides system-wide support for differential signaling, and lets you take full advantage offered by the LVDS capabilities of today’s FPGAs.

You can define differential signal pairs at the schematic or PCB level – Altium Designer will propagate and synchronize the definitions throughout the project. With linked FPGA and PCB projects, Altium Designer automatically maps a differential signal defined as within the FPGA project to appropriate signal pairs in the physical design.

Altium Designer’s PCB editor includes interactive routing support for differential signals, allowing you to simultaneously route both nets of a pair under full design rule compliance. This provides integrated and system-wide support for differential signal from FPGA design right through to PCB layout.

Managing signal integrity issues

The fast edge transitions on modern logic families are making signal integrity analysis a crucial part of the physical design process. FPGAs in particular can present significant problems. The wide range of programmable I/O characteristics available on these devices complicates the process of correctly terminating signal lines to prevent excessive reflections.

With Altium Designer you can perform signal integrity analysis at the capture stage, as well as during board layout. This allows you to identify potential problem areas, determine the correct termination strategy and add the necessary components to the design before moving to PCB layout.

Full impedance, signal reflection and crosstalk analysis can be run on your final board to check the real-world performance of your design after layout is complete. Signal integrity screening is built into the Altium Designer design rules system, allowing you to check for potential signal integrity violations as part of the normal board DRC process.

Impedance-controlled routing

Net impedance, track clearances, signal reflections, path lengths, critical trace widths – all these factors and many more need to be carefully monitored and controlled to produce a successful board design.

Impedance-controlled routing is an excellent technique for minimizing potential signal integrity issues on a board. As well as specifying track widths as a numerical value, you can also specify them as a required impedance with Altium Designer.

Functional circuit simulation is a useful tool in investigating aspects of circuit performance during development. With Altium Designer you don’t need to move to a separate environment in order to make use of simulation in your design flows. Mixed-signal circuit simulation is a unified part of the capture process, and is fully integrated with the schematic editing environment.

Simulation overview

The Altium Designer simulation engine supports both standard SPICE 3f5/XSpice and PSpice models, giving you the widest possible choice of component simulation options.

Altium Designer provides a full array of simulation analyses, including advanced temperature and parameter sweeping, Monte Carlo component tolerance sweeps, pole-zero analysis and noise analysis.

Simulation results are displayed for analysis in the integrated waveform viewer, which gives you a detailed and accurate picture of circuit performance. You can perform mathematical post-processing of simulation results, overlay waveforms, display different simulation types on a single graph and export the waveform data.

Support for PSPICE

Altium Designer's mixed-signal simulator has been updated to provide compatibility with PSpice models and circuits. This allows the use of manufacturer supplied PSpice models in addition to the existing support of the XSPICE standard.

Go back to the Altium Designer 6.0 Product Overview or select a process from above.