PCB software update increases design productivity

By leveraging feedback from the user community and with significant efforts in research and development, Altium Designer 18 delivers key updates and performance enhancements, along with new and improved features that increase design productivity.

Altium Designer 18 continues its focus on delivering solutions that help designers increase their productivity, with modern tools that are easy to learn, easy to use, and easy to implement. This release simplifies the overall design experience with a modernised user interface that improves user commonality across all design domains, making it even more intuitive and accessible.

In addition to the modern user interface, this version features the much-anticipated upgrade to 64-bit architecture combined with multi-threaded task optimisations, enabling users to design and release large, complex boards at unprecedented speeds. This upgrade fully equips engineers to tackle even the most complex PCB designs, with key performance optimisations and increased user control through every stage of the design process.

"The landscape of electronic design and technology is shifting, prompting the need for smarter, faster, more efficient engineering solutions that are flexible and easy to learn,” said Ted Pawela, Chief Marketing Officer at Altium. “Altium Designer 18 was developed specifically with the user in mind, leveraging their feedback to create a PCB design tool that helps address the challenges they face every day.”

Altium Designer 18 not only features huge structural improvements, but also includes major updates to ActiveRoute, a user-guided routing engine that now supports length tuning and pin-swapping, enabling users to quickly produce high-quality routes. The ACTIVEBOM editor also features several enhancements including a new BoM rule checker that allows designers to easily verify each BoM line item.

Users can also design and release large, complex boards faster than ever before using the new multi-board assembly capability and real-time connection management. Each update in this release reinforces a unified, interconnected design environment, giving users a synchronised platform that enhances both individual productivity and team collaboration.

“Altium Designer 18 is the most powerful and intuitive mainstream PCB design solution we’ve ever launched,” said Sergey Kostinsky, Vice President of Engineering at Altium. “What makes this release unique is we’ve substantially improved the underlying technology infrastructure and at the same time delivered a host of new features and enhancements, giving users the tools they need to increase design productivity.”