Design Automation


Altium Designer 2013 released

6 March 2013 Design Automation

Altium announced the release of Altium Designer 2013, not only delivering new and enhanced features, but also opening up the platform to key partners by allowing third parties to write apps for delivery in the Altium ecosystem, or extend their own ecosystem using Altium’s technologies.

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:

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

* Schematic pin name/designator position, font and colour customisation.

* 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.

* 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.

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.

Altium Designer 2013 is available with a standard licence which provides users with full custom board design and manufacturing capabilities. It also has a complete front-end engineering design and verification system for both board-level and programmable logic design and full 3D PCB design and editing capabilities.

By comparison, the System Engineering licence 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.



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