Coinciding with the release of Altium Designer 10 at the recent Embedded World exhibition, Altium introduced concepts in Altium Vaults and AltiumLive.
Altium Vaults is the technology at the heart of Altium Designer 10’s new design data management functionality, while AltiumLive is an online ecosystem for electronics design professionals that connects designers with collaborators, suppliers, manufacturers and, in the future, customers.
From Altium Designer 10 onwards, and using AltiumLive, Altium will deliver content and updates continuously. Designers using Altium Designer will simply log onto AltiumLive, select content (new functions, upgrade, content, IP and more) that is appropriate or relevant, download and install. As an example of this, Altium Designer extends the designer’s reach into the supply chain, adding Mouser and Arrow to Altium Designer’s new live links function.
AltiumLive is a sound online environment for downloading, dealing in and sharing electronics design-related content. A new blog provides detailed technical papers, comment and discourse, and a new system has been created so that users can influence the future content in Altium Designer (via a nomination and voting system called BugCrunch!). AltiumLive is open to non-users, who will also have access to some of this new information and content. To start with, AltiumLive membership is by invitation, and anyone can register their interest now.
Unified component model
Altium Vaults form the heart of Altium’s smart data management technologies. They store and manage electronics design data, and this lets designers release validated design data inside or outside their organisations with confidence.
Vaults let designers manage revisions, design data, manage component lifecycles and track usage across designs, and provide links to supply chains to provide real-time information about parts being specified in designs.
Users have a number of Vault options. Managed Vaults are cloud-based and run entirely in AltiumLive as cloud-based services. Designers will not need to run any servers or infrastructure of their own – they will be managed by Altium.
Satellite Vaults are hosted locally on users’ own systems, ideal for companies who prefer to keep their design data behind firewalls, with user authentication through AltiumLive. Finally, Enterprise Vault Servers are a way to establish an independent vault system inside a user’s own organisation, especially for those who do not allow Internet connections because of security concerns.
Altium’s ‘Unified Component’ model effectively maps the concept of a design component – in the traditional electronics design space – to the component as seen by the rest of the organisation in the bigger ‘product space’. This model not only represents the component in the different design domains but also facilitates choices of the desired physical components – real-world manufactured items – at design time, offering an improvement in terms of procurement cost and time when manufacturing the assembled product.
The design component, as seen by the designer, is separated from the manufacturer and/or vendor parts. This information is not defined as part of the component. Instead, a separate document is used to map the design component to one or more manufacturer parts, listed in a Global Parts Catalogue, which in turn can be mapped to one or more vendor parts, allowing the designer to state up-front what real parts can be used for any given design component used in a design.
The components themselves, along with their part choices, are stored in the centralised vault which effectively provides the common ground between the two sides.
Videos explaining the features described above can be seen at ad10.altium.com and live.altium.com. A white paper describing Altium’s next-generation component management system is downloadable from www.dataweek.co.za/+dw7760_p
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