Altium Designer 14 offers industy first 3D PCB features

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 unique 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.

Narinder Kumar, PCB Design Engineer for Pelco (a division of Schneider Electric), commented: “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. Altium has continued to deliver breakthrough technology and features into their products to meet the demands of their customers. This rigid-flex design is a very cool feature. It’s been a long time coming, and I like it.”

Unique 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.

Comprehensive high speed PCB design capabilities with easier definition of rules and constraints

• 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 is a significant step forward compared to previous Altium Designer products delivering the functionality and features our customers need to fuel electronics innovation and performance. We are listening to our customers. Based on feedback from our ‘Ideas’ forum, we have implemented many features and enhancements requested to provide engineers and designers with the most advanced, efficient electronics design solution available," comments Frank Hoschar, Chief Marketing Officer at Altium.

License options

Altium Designer is available in three major license options:

• Altium Designer 14 Full custom board design and manufacturing capabilities. Native 3D PCB design and editing. Complete front-end engineering design system for both board-level and programmable logic design. Analog and digital simulation, System-on-FPGA implementation.
• Altium Designer 14 SE This option is for the system engineer with complete front-end schematic design for both board-level and programmable logic design. Analog and digital simulation, System-on-FPGA implementation.
• Altium Designer 14 Viewer Free, quick, easy and secure read-only exploration of Altium Designer projects and documents.

Pricing and availability

Altium Designer 14 pricing starts at 5,395 EUR, including a one year subscription. Extended services and custom support packages are available from Altium and our extended network of value added resellers worldwide and can be found at http://www.altium.com/en/how-to-buy/global-sales-network. Altium Designer 14 Viewer remains to be free of charge to members of the AltiumLive community.