New Features in the Summer 09 Release of Altium Designer
The Summer 09 release of Altium Designer continues the process of keeping you plugged into a continuous stream of new features and technologies. They are designed to make it easier for you to create your next generation electronics designs. And we continue to make Altium Designer available to as many electronics designers as possible.
Altium's unified design architecture brings together hardware, software and programmable hardware into a single application. This gives you the freedom to explore new design ideas across a project, across a whole team. Everyone has a single view of the design across the entire design process.
The Summer 09 release addresses a number of features and legacy issues requested by you. These include the addition of more mechanical layers for board layout, and enhanced definition of Net Classes on the schematic. This new release focuses on improving the assignment and management of testpoints, refining embedded software development, taking debugging of the embedded intelligence in your soft designs to a whole new level, and streamlining license management which will help you to get Altium Designer into the hands of more of your engineers.
We're excited about the new features and technologies we're developing for this release and the reaction they are receiving, and we're sure that you'll be excited too!
Board Implementation
Enhanced Display of DRC Violations | Customization of Net Colors |
Increased Mechanical Layers for Board DesignRead more about the additional mechanical layers... Plus...Enhanced Glossing and 'Glossing Off' Mode Available in SP1 | Improved DirectX Rebuild SpeedThe DirectX graphics engine for Altium Designer's PCB environment has been enhanced in this release, with respect to the rebuild speed. This has been achieved by not rebuilding unless absolutely necessary (a rebuild is seldom required) and optimizing the DirectX data filling routines. As a result, there is a 20% speed increase for scene rebuilds and toggling layer visibility no longer needs any rebuild at all. |
Front-End Design
Schematic Net Class Definition - by AreaRead more about net class definition by area on the schematic... | Graphical Editing of Assembly Variants and Board-Level AnnotationsRead more about graphical editing of assembly variants and board-level annotations... |
Soft Design
High-Level Software Development | Wishbone Probe Instrument |
Connected FPGA ScriptsRead more about connected FPGA scripts... Plus...Automatic Firmware Updates (NanoBoard 3000) Available in SP1 | Memory Instrument |
System-Level
On-Demand Licensing SystemThe Summer 09 release of Altium Designer heralds the addition of web-based, on-demand licensing to the software's overall licensing system. Tightly integrated with customer accounts through the Altium Portal, web-based on-demand license management allows a license to be used on any computer without the need to move license files or activate on each machine. This provides a global floating license capability - within the geographic scope of your license and the conditions set out in the EULA - without needing to implement your own server. Read more about On-Demand licensing... Plus...Option to Include Not Fitted Components in the BOM for a Variant Available in SP2 Browser-Based License Management & Reporting** | Supplier Data ImprovementsThe Summer 09 release of Altium Designer expands the support for live linking to component supplier information. Two new suppliers are available – Newark and Farnell. For any given Supplier Item found through a search in the Supplier Search panel, you can now import its parameters, data sheet links, pricing and stock information, as parameters of a target library component (SchLib, DbLib, SVNDbLib), or placed component on a schematics sheet. In addition, you can also create whole new components in a target library directly from Supplier Items! Provision is also made for converting the display of supplier pricing information into one of a number of supported currencies. |
Legacy Issues
Many long standing legacy issues have been addressed in this release, further demonstrating our commitment and resolve to bring you the very best unified design solution to empower your innovation and bring your electronic products smoothly to market. For a complete list of fixed issues, refer to the release notes.