Altium Designer 2013 Available

This creates a range of opportunities for users, partners and system integrators and represents a quantum leap for the industry.



As part of Altium’s continuous content delivery model, Altium Subscription customers have already benefited from the many enhancements that have been delivered since Release 12. Altium Designer 2013 further improves the design environment for users by delivering several new PCB features and updates to the core PCB and Schematic tools.



Key new features of Altium Designer 2013 include:



• Addition of PCB object and Layer transparency settings to the View Configurations dialog.

• Silk to Solder Mask design rule with new checking modes (to exposed copper and to solder mask openings).

• Outline vertices editor for PCB Polygon Pours, Polygon Cutouts and Solid Region objects.

• Ability to define polygonal-shaped blanket directives.

• Schematic Pin name/designator position, font and color customization.

• Individual port height and font control.

• Text objects in schematic documents now support hyperlinks.

• Smart PDF documents contain component parameters - Clicking on a component in a PDF file produced by SmartPDF will display the parameters of that component.

• Support for Microchip mTouch capacitive controls.

• Upgraded DXP platform to provide a robust and open development environment.



In addition, Altium’s new AppsBuilder will be available shortly, which will allow for the creation of custom applications and extend Altium’s DXP design environment even further.



“The release process for Altium Designer 2013 was one of the most intense we have been through to date but the interaction and collaboration with some of our most engaged customers made it one of the most successful,” says Matt Schwaiger, a senior member of Altium’s Product Management team. “It’s the collaboration with our users which ensures features and enhancements delivered bring the most value to our community as a whole.”



Frank Hoschar, CMO at Altium says: “Altium Designer 2013 is a milestone release as it provides an open platform expanding Altium’s reach beyond our user community (of more than 80,000 engineers working on the DXP platform) into industry partner communities. Additionally, Altium Designer provides a number of key enhancements from Altium Designer 12, which include new

• Via Stitching capabilities providing support for RF and high-speed designs,

• Greater flexibility for re-annotating PCB designs,

• Other PCB productivity enhancements including improved cross-select mode, improved selection controls and easier polygon pour management

• Improvements to the Mentor PADS PCB, PADS Logic and Expedition importers as well as Ansoft and Hyperlynx exporters,

• Support for ARM Cortex-M3 Discrete Processors, SEGGER J-Link and Altera Arria2GX FPGAs.”



License options

Altium Designer 2013 is available with the following license options:



• Altium Designer 2013

This license provides users with full custom board design and manufacturing capabilities. It also has complete front-end engineering design and verification system for both board-level and programmable logic design and full 3D PCB design and editing capabilities.



• Altium Designer 2013 SE

This is the System Engineering version that provides users with complete front-end schematic design and design capture for both board-level and programmable logic design. It includes analog/digital simulation, verification and Embedded-System-on-FPGA implementation.