PCB design tool update enhances productivity & automation

As electronic designs continue to expand in complexity, engineers are often left with the daunting task of managing all of the details needed to complete their designs on-time and error-free. Altium Designer 16 includes several new productivity and automation-focused enhancements, allowing engineers to design even the most complex board layouts in significantly less time.

Alternative Part Choice System allows designers to fully control their component selection process with backup part choices for manufacturing. Visual Clearance Boundaries allow designers to understand the impact of their routing decisions in real-time with visual clearance boundaries between objects on a board;

Component Placement System allows designers to create the most organised and efficient board layouts with new component placement options. Integrated TASKING Pin Mapper allows designers to instantly share design data between a PCB and an embedded software project;

Offline Design System allows designers to fully control of what network data is shared with the outside world with specific connectivity sharing options; and 3D STEP Model Generation Wizard allows designers to generate realistic and accurate 3D models to provide an exact representation of a board in physical reality.

Jason Hingston, CTO, Altium, commented: “Engineers are constantly being challenged to design PCBs in increasingly smaller product packages while still requiring the highest-performance electronics. Altium Designer 16 empowers every engineer with the powerful capabilities needed to meet the challenges of these design demands with industry-leading productivity and automation tools found only in the unified Altium Designer platform.”

Altium Designer 16 is available now as a free upgrade to all Altium Subscription customers and can be downloaded from the Altium Products Download page. Start a free 30 day trial of Altium Designer and experience all of the features available in this release.