Vault-driven design now a reality with Altium Designer’s unified platform

Using Altium Designer, Altium Vault technology and a methodology that uses a vault-centric approach to electronics design, engineers are able to design in a controlled way without loss of design freedom. With managed design 'building blocks' approved for design reuse the wheel does not have to be reinvented; reuse of proven technology increases confidence. Subsequently, once the design is ready for release, data can pass from the design domain to the production domain in a pain-free, streamlined, and automated fashion.

Developing electronic devices involves several tasks; schematic entry and PCB layout is part of that job. But normally PCBs are sold fully populated, as complete boards. And there is more — for example, signal integrity, SPICE simulation and embedded system design. Those domains are traditionally delivered with completely different tools, written in different languages and project databases as well as methodologies. Often the different tools needed are roughly grouped to form a complete ‘tool-chain’. The disadvantage of this approach is clear; the domains aren’t really integrated. A good example is the data transfer between schematic entry and PCB design with a netlist. The netlist file describes how the individual components are connected, but no other information is included. For example, information other than nets in the schematic and the PCB, such as housing, cannot be detected without writing additional tools.##IMAGE_2_C##

The development of Altium Designer started where it made sense; with a unified set of data for a project provided by a platform called Design Explorer. All functional domains are integrated into that platform as servers. And all domains can read the data from the other domains and compare them. This is nothing less than a proper basis for data management.

You can read the rest of this article in the September issue of Electronic Specifier Design by clicking here.