New summer 09 release of Altium Designer

The summer 09 release of Altium Designer continues the process of keeping you plugged into a continuous stream of new features and technologies. It builds on many of the features introduced in the winter 09 release and delivers new design elements that further remove barriers to innovative design and development.

The summer 09 release addresses a number of features and legacy issues requested by you. These include graphical editing of variants, the addition of additional mechanical layers for board layout and enhanced schematic definition of Net Classes and rules by area.

This new release also delivers improved assignment and management of testpoints, more refined embedded software development which takes debugging of the embedded intelligence in your soft designs to a whole new level, and a new streamlined license management system.

What’s in the summer 09 release

For board designers, the new release refines Altium Designer’s board design interface and technologies to deliver a better overall design experience. It delivers extra mechanical layers, enhanced display of design rule violations, faster graphical performance and a whole host of user interface improvements. It’s all about getting essential board design tasks done faster, and letting you to find and eliminate subtle design errors more easily.

Here are a few highlights:

  • Increased Mechanical Layers for Board Design

    16 new mechanical layers are now available for board implementation. This doubles the available layers, bringing the total number of mechanical layers to 32. Watch the video.

  • Enhanced Display of DRC Violations

    The use of detailed custom violation graphics has been extended to include the majority of design rules that can be checked as part of Online and/or Batch DRC. Complemented through the provision of a definable violation overlay, you now have even greater flexibility over how DRC violations are displayed in the workspace. Watch the video.

  • Improved DirectX Rebuild Speed

    The DirectX graphics engine for the PCB environment has been enhanced with respect to the rebuild speed. This has been achieved by not rebuilding unless absolutely necessary (a rebuild is seldom required) and optimizing the DirectX data filling routines. As a result, there is a 20% speed increase for scene rebuilds and toggling layer visibility no longer needs any rebuild at all.

For hardware-savvy embedded developers, Altium Designer is the only design system that allows you to easily create your system hardware using reconfigurable logic, without needing to become an expert in the hardware design process. It provides a high-level interface and tools to allow rapid development of systems to an advanced stage without the need to manufacture custom hardware.

The new summer 09 release takes the software development capabilities of Altium Designer to a new level with the introduction of C++ support in addition to the existing C language support. This greatly expands the application areas that the system can be used for and opens up new design possibilities to software engineers.

Here are a few more highlights:

  • On-Demand Licensing System

    New web-based, on-demand licensing has been added to the software's overall licensing system. Tightly integrated with customer accounts through the Altium portal, web-based on-demand license management allows a license to be used on any computer without the need to move license files or activate on each machine. This provides a global floating license capability – within the geographic scope of your license and the conditions set out in the EULA – without needing to implement your own server.

  • High-Level Software Development

    As software development technology has progressed there has been a distinct trend towards higher-level, more abstract software development languages and tools – from machine code, to assembly language, to procedural languages to object oriented languages. Altium Designer already supports software development using C, which is a procedural language. Support for software development using C++ (a higher level language) is now provided. This support includes full compilation and debugging capabilities. Watch the video.

  • Supplier Data Improvements

    Altium Designer’s support for live linking to component supplier information has been expanded. Two new suppliers are available – Newark and Farnell. For any given Supplier Item found, you can now import its parameters, data sheet links, pricing and stock information, as parameters of a target library component, or placed component on a schematics sheet. You can also create whole new components in a target library directly from Supplier Items. Watch the video

Find out more

Download the free trial, go on a guided tour, rethink what's possible: Altium Deisgner.
Check out the full range of short summer 09 feature videos.
For more information on these features, plus many more, go to the Altium Wiki.

► August 09 Envision home