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Altium has released a new version of its flagship product, Altium Designer 14.
Altium Designer now features support for flex and rigid-flex design, including schematic capture, 3D PCB layout, analysis and programmable design – all in a single, unified solution.
With its native 3D visual support of this technology, Altium Designer 14 opens the door for new innovations in electronic design by allowing for increased processing and communication within a smaller, more fluid space.
The enhanced platform allows for smaller packaging of electronic designs, which in turn leads to lower cost of materials and production, and increased durability.
“I’ve been using Altium software for almost 30 years, and rigid-flex is one of the coolest new features that has come up, from my personal wish list, of the last three years,” stated Narinder Kumar, PCB Design Engineer for Pelco (a division of Schneider Electric). “This rigid-flex design is a very cool feature. It’s been a long time coming, and I like it.”
3D implementation of advanced board design capabilities make them accessible to mainstream designers:
● Flex and Rigid Flex PCB design support – This release includes the ability to handle the challenges of flex and rigid-flex designs including advanced layer stack management.
● Support for embedded PCB components – Allowing far greater design miniaturization opportunities by placing standard components on an inner layer of the circuit board during fabrication.
High speed PCB design capabilities with easier definition of rules and constraints deliver:
● Simplification of high speed design rules, including automated and guided adjustment of differential pair width-gap settings ensuring pair impedance is maintained.
● Via-stitching improvements: The capabilities of the PCB Editor’s via-stitching have been enhanced to include the ability to constrain the via-stitching pattern to a user defined area.
New wizards improve interoperability with popular ECAD and MCAD formats:
● CadSoft Eagle Importer – With the understanding that not all design work is done in Altium Designer, Altium has introduced an importer for CadSoft Eagle so customers can use design files in other formats.
● Autodesk AutoCAD Import / Export – up-to-date support for transfer of designs to and from AutoCAD *.DWG and *.DXF formats. The importer/exporter interfaces have been upgraded to support the latest versions of AutoCAD and a wider range of object types.
● Direct use of IBIS models for IC pins facilitate signal integrity analysis with Altium Designer.
Altium Designer 14 pricing starts at US$7,245, including a one year subscription.