Software upgrade focuses on use of copper areas on the board

While more and more Altium Designer users create large and complex boards, there is an ongoing focus on performance improvements. For this release, the emphasis of development was around the use of copper areas on the board. As a result of this effort, users can experience a significantly increased repour speed. Depending on the number and complexity of the polygon pours in a design, the repour speed increase can be anywhere from 2x to potentially greater than 20x faster. This is especially beneficial in later design stages by dramatically reducing the time to implement changes in the layout.

Other enhancements include:

• Enhancements to the PCB Drill Table
• Enhanced indication of disabled PCB Design Rules
• Schematic support for vector graphics
• Support for global bookmarks in Smart PDF
• Support for Subversion 1.8

“This update to Altium Designer is all about optimisation and continues to focus on enhancements, performance updates and fixes to our core technologies.”, says Dave Read, Director Product Marketing at Altium. “Approaching 100 enhancements / fixes in total, and addressing 30 popular requests raised by our customers through the AltiumLive Community, this release takes a significant amount of user feedback into the product.”

Additionally, for users of DxDesigner from Mentor Graphics, the Altium development team have built an improved and updated DxDesigner file importer. The importer, currently in the later stages of beta testing, greatly helps designers considering the switch to Altium Designer.