Managing the entire development process

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 integrated design environment and gives you a unified project and document management infrastructure that supports the convergence of traditionally separate design disciplines.

Altium Designer brings efficiency and enhanced productivity to electronic product development by providing platform-level integration of all design processes.

The development of electronic products is a juggling act that balances the drive to embed more and more intelligence into a design with the time needed to create, implement and test the application. In order to compete in this convergent design landscape you need to be able to efficiently manage projects and data that transcend traditional tool boundaries.

Navigating product development through a landscape of loosely-connected point tools create barriers to design efficiency, forcing you to work around data translation and project synchronization issues. Even with superficial integration between tools, you still need to deal with multiple design and project management environments in order to develop a single product.

Altium Designer brings efficiency and enhanced productivity to electronic product development by providing platform-level integration of all design processes, and giving you a unified project and document management infrastructure that supports the convergence of traditionally separate design disciplines. Altium Designer allows you to bring together the discrete hardware, programmable hardware and software that make up a system, and take a design from concept to completion in less time than has previously been possible.

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

Altium Designer provides a single, unified environment for the creation and management of all of the different project types that go to make up your complete electronic product. What’s more, Altium Designer allows you to link these projects to define the overall structure of your design.

The different project types exist in their own right and can be worked on independently, but are linked in a logical way. For example, a PCB project is linked to the FPGA projects for the programmable logic devices it contains. An embedded software project is linked to the processor contained in the FPGA project that defines the execution platform. Because Altium Designer understands the structural links between projects, it can intelligently and automatically manage the flow of essential data between them.

Change the pin assignment of an FPGA at the board level, for instance, and Altium Designer understands that this data must be synchronized with the PCB source schematics and with the FPGA project constraints that drive FPGA place and route. You don’t need to manually propagate this data between different design environments.

Similarly, when you add memory or peripheral hardware to a processor within an FPGA project, Altium Designer can automatically generate the C header files necessary to address this hardware within the software project.

With Altium Designer, the ability to create and link within a single environment all of the different projects that go to make up your final product design brings design efficiencies not possible with traditional point tools. This efficiency translates into shorter design cycles and higher productivity for your entire design team.

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.

A single electronic product development project can generate literally hundreds of design-related documents. And each document can go through many revisions during the course of the development process. As designs grow in complexity, so does the need to systematically track and control the storage and revision of design documents. Increasingly organizations are implementing document version control systems to manage this process.

Altium Designer provides comprehensive and versatile support for linking to external version control systems, as well as the ability to locally track the history of your design documents. Altium Designer can interface to any third-party version control system that supports the Source Code Control Interface (SCCI), Concurrent Versions System (CVS) or Subversion (SVN) standards. This includes commercial systems such as Microsoft Visual SourceSafe and most popular open source version control applications.

From within Altium Designer you can add design documents to any specified repository within the version control system and perform all common version control tasks such as document check-in and version labeling. This allows you to manage your documents without leaving the Altium Designer environment.

Even if you don’t have a full version control system operating within your organization, Altium Designer allows you to easily track the history of documents within a project at a local level. Each time you save a file, Altium Designer will automatically store a copy of the original file to create a full history of the document changes. You can label milestone versions and add comments to the history files to document changes.

In Altium Designer, full support for external document version control and local document history management combine to give you flexibility and security in the handling of your important design 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.

Maintaining a document’s history is one challenge. But being able to efficiently determine what has changed between versions of a document is crucial to efficient management of documents during development.

While most version control systems allow you to easily see the differences between versions of text-based files, graphical documents such as schematic diagrams and PCB layout files present a whole new set of challenges. Changes to these types of documents can be difficult to pinpoint, particularly where the change does not affect connectivity. For example, in a PCB layout you may reroute a particular connection in order to improve signal integrity. On a complex board, spotting this change is almost impossible by visually comparing the two 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. This allows you to quickly and easily identify even the most subtle graphical differences between versions of schematic and PCB documents.

The comparison features are fully-integrated with Altium Designer’s storage management and versioning facilities, allowing you to easily compare your current document with versions in the local history or version control repository. Or indeed to compare any two previous versions of a document.

The graphical comparison features combine with Altium Designer’s comprehensive version control support to provide the capabilities you need to effectively manage all your design documents, and maintain the integrity of your design files throughout the entire design process and across your entire design team.

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