Altium has released its Service Pack 2 for PCAD-2004, as well as an update for its Bonus Technologies. SP2 contains a variety of enhancements designed to give more power and control over the PCB design process.
The enhancements include seven new features, 14 productivity enhancements, 11 improvements to the Situs Auto Router, and over 100 improvements and fixes for PCB, Library Executive, and Schematic. There are also a number of miscellaneous improvements for general platform and product performance.
Most notable are productivity enhancements such as Variants that can now be defined in both schematic and PCB with full ECO support in both directions, as well as the ability to run multiple instances of all P-CAD applications. The addition of backwards compatibility support facilitates staggered upgrades within companies and more trouble-free interaction between internal and external organisations.
Additionally, efficiency has been greatly improved with layer ordering for printing and important improvements to copper pours. SP2 also comes with increased routing power due to improvements to glossing and hugging performance, and the Specctra/SitusT Exporter.
"SP2 is a very significant upgrade for P-CAD that addresses a lot of the complaints that people have had about it," said William Kitchen, senior PCB designer, AMX. "The leap from SP1 to SP2 seems as significant as the leap from P-CAD 2002 to P-CAD 2004. Maybe more so because SP2 is pretty robust, where as the initial 2004 was still a little buggy and rough around the edges. So some features are only now becoming functional enough to really count even though they were introduced then. The Advanced Route tool, for example, is much more useable in SP2 than in SP1 or earlier."
P-CAD 2004 is currently offered with 'Bonus Technologies' that bring additional power and efficiency to the design process. SP2 for P-CAD 2004 is available for free download for all licensed P-CAD 2004 customers from www.altium.com/pcad/resources/downloads/
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