Altium Designer
| Altium Designer
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| developer | Altium Limited |
| Current version | 20.0 (December 02, 2019) |
| operating system | Windows |
| programming language | Embarcadero Delphi |
| category | Computer-aided design |
| License | proprietary |
| altium.com | |
Altium Designer (marketed under the name Protel until 2005 ) is an EDA program from Altium Limited for the development of printed circuit boards in electronics .
history
Today's Altium Limited published its first PCB layout program Protel PCB in Australia in 1985 . In 1986 exports to the USA and Europe followed . In 1987 Protel Schematic was added to create circuit diagrams . The software was the first ECad software ever to appear on Windows in 1991. With Protel 98 , the individual program components were integrated in one surface. The software has been sold under the name Altium Designer since 2005. In 2007 version 6.8 was the world's first ECad solution to offer three-dimensional circuit board visualization. In April 2011 Altium moved its headquarters from Australia to Shanghai, China. As a result, most of the Sydney employees were laid off.
P-CAD
In 2000 the company Accel Technologies from San Diego , California with its program P-CAD was taken over by Altium. P-CAD had a similar functionality to Protel, the idea was to combine the best of both tools. P-CAD went on sale in 2000, and in 2006 it was discontinued in favor of Altium Designer. An import wizard is available for migrating from P-CAD to Altium.
The import function does not work reliably with old PCAD data. When trying to import a circuit board, Altium can crash or (e.g. in the case of copper surfaces) take over properties incorrectly.
Functions
One of Altium's primary goals is to provide an integrated development solution for electronics development .
Altium Designer includes the schematic input, a PCB layout editor with integrity analysis and a circuit simulation based on SPICE models.
An essential function of the program is the complete implementation of 3D models in the circuit board design. Flex-PCBs can be folded, the placements visualized and, based on rules, spatially checked for distance in real time. The exchange with MCAD programs is possible by importing and exporting STEP files. There is an interface to SOLIDWORKS as well as direct integration to 3DEXPERIENCE.
With the new Altium Designer 18 version, which was published on December 15, 2017, the program now also works with 64-bit and supports multicore processors, which significantly compared the performance to the previous models, which were 32-bit programs. has increased.
Specifically, the software offers modules for the following tasks:
- Circuit diagram acquisition
- Circuit board layout
- FPGA programming (not supported since Altium 17)
- Embedded software (not supported since Altium 17)
- Circuit simulation
- CAM (Computer Aided Manufacturing)
- Create technical drawings (Draftsman has been available as a free extension since Altium 16.1)
distribution
Altium is still used in some departments of Bosch , Intel , Philips , Siemens and others and has received numerous awards in various countries. The main software of the companies mentioned is Cadence-Mentor and Pulsonix.
Web links
- Official website
- Brief introduction (PDF) FH Pforzheim
- The Altium Designer PCB Cookbook
- Altium Designer Tips
Individual evidence
- ↑ The future of PCB design . Altium Press Release dated December 2, 2019, accessed January 8, 2020
- ↑ Altium to Relocate its Global Headquarters to Shanghai, China ( Memento from September 28, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 78 kB)
- ↑ Protel Shareholder News, January 2000 (PDF; 547 kB)
- ↑ altium.com
- ↑ altium.force.com
- ↑ altium.com
- ↑ Customer projects ( Memento from March 16, 2010 in the Internet Archive )