Altium Limited, a global leader in Smart System Design Automation and provider of solutions for 3D PCB design (Altium Designer) and embedded software development (TASKING), has launched a major update to their flagship product, Altium Designer 13.2.
“These new enhancements will have profound impact on how designers approach development for cost or time sensitive products,” said Matt Schwaiger, senior product manager, EDA for Altium. “We’ve significantly improved and stabilized key aspects of Altium Designer through continuous engagement with our customer base and by remaining focused on developing our core toolset.”
Altium Designer 13.2 delivers features and enhancements designed to give users better control over their design data and a clearer view throughout the development process (Figure 1). Not only does this release offer improved documentation features for PCB designs, it offers significant gains to cost conscious engineering process.
New features of Altium Designer 13.2 include:
- Live Drill Table and PCB Design View
Developed from customer requests, the Live Drill table is a highly customizable, real-time view of the drilling requirements of a PCB design. The PCB Design View object provides a configurable and detailed scaled view of elements in a PCB layout.
- ActiveBOM
With the ActiveBOM feature, Altium Designer 13.2 elevates the Bill of Materials from a post-design output report to a living part of the design - edited and developed alongside schematics and PCB layout files.
This approach facilitates a design-to-cost style of design. When coupled with Altium Vault Server product, it gives complete visibility into component costs based on supply chain data gathered from both online vendors and an organization’s own internal component database systems.
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| Figure 1. | Altium Designer 13.2 - Enhanced PCB Documentation tools, Supply Chain Aware BOM Editor, and new Via Stitching Tools. |
Key Benefits
Features in the Altium Designer 13.2 update brings an organization better clarity, confidence and control over their design data and product development flow. Key benefits include:
- Reduce overall product costs using tools that allow teams to define target costs and provide an up to date and clear picture of costs throughout a design.
- Reduce the risk of manufacturing error through design documentation tools that clearly show design intent.
- Improved confidence by understanding the cost implications of design revisions and product updates.
- Avoid production delays through better understanding of supply chain risk of component choices.
- Faster time to market by fostering a robust streamlined collaboration between design, production and procurement teams.
- Enhanced productivity from a real time view of product BOM cost, avoiding unexpected product component cost creep during design development.
Availability
The Altium Designer 13.2 update is available to Altium subscription customers through Altium Designer 13 directly using the Plug-ins and Updates tool or the Installer can be downloaded from the Downloads page in AltiumLive.
