Design Automation


Altium releases Altium Designer 18

31 January 2018 Design Automation

The rapidly expanding global PCB market has spurred remarkable advancements in the world of electronic design, with new products that are more sophisticated, more compact, and more complex than ever before. To meet the needs of today’s engineer, Altium has rolled out the most powerful, modern, easy-to-use release of Altium Designer to date.

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 significantly increase design productivity.

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 faster. 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.

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.

The new technologies introduced in Altium Designer 18 are available now as a free upgrade for existing Altium Subscription customers on the Altium Downloads page.



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