Bring the future to your desktop

“ The process of developing electronics is

undergoing some fundamental changes.
Changes that are likely to be as significant
as those that followed the availability
of low-cost microprocessors more than
20 years ago.

The ability to embed whole systems,

hardware and software, in low-cost,
high-capacity programmable devices
(FPGAs) is ushering in a very different
view of the design process. Harnessing
the opportunities created by this change,
and tackling the problems that it raises,
are examples of the challenges that
must be faced. Our vision
At Altium, we are passionate about putting
Historically, the most advanced, state-of-the-art
the best available design technology into
design tools have been prohibitively priced, with
the hands of every engineer. This is the
access being limited to engineers based within
reason that I formed the company more
the few companies that could afford them.
than two decades ago, and continues as
our driving force today. We're dedicated The Altium vision – unchanged since the
to providing systems that not only serve Company's inception – is to break down
your current design needs, but also help these barriers to innovation and technological
you navigate fundamental changes in the advancement and provide every engineer and
electronics industry. system designer with easy access to the best
possible design solutions. Our ultimate goal is
Whether you are working alone, as part
to develop the complete electronics design
of a small team, or as part of a larger
system and ensure it is available to every
organization – whether it's coping with
professional engineer and designer.
an increasingly 'soft' design environment,
or harnessing the power of today's This is the driving force behind why our Company
powerful, low-cost desktop computers –
we can help you be successful in
electronic product development and
move confidently into the future.
“ was founded and is still the vision that guides
our strategies today and into the future.

Nick Martin
Founder and CEO of Altium Limited
Contents

1 – The art of electronic product development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .01

2 – Building the physical platform – PCB design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .11

3 – Integrating programmable devices with physical design . . . . . . . . . . . .23

4 – Managing components and libraries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .29

5 – Moving the design through to manufacture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .35

6 – Harnessing the power of programmable devices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .41

7 – Managing the entire development process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .53

8 – Deploying Altium Designer with confidence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .59

Copyright © 2005 Altium Limited. Altium, Altium Designer, Board Insight, CAMtastic, CircuitStudio, Design Explorer, DXP, LiveDesign, NanoBoard, NanoTalk, Nexar, nVisage, P-CAD, Protel, Situs,
TASKING, and Topological Autorouting and their respective logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of Altium Limited or its subsidiaries. Actel is a registered trademark of Actel Corporation.
Altera, Cyclone, Max and Stratix are registered trademarks of Altera Corporation. Xilinx, CoolRunner, Virtex and Spartan are registered trademarks of Xilinx Inc. OrCAD, OrCAD Capture, OrCAD
layout, SPECCTRA and Verilog are registered trademarks of Cadence Design Systems, Inc and Windows and Visual SourceSafe are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. All other
registered or unregistered trademarks referenced herein are the property of their respective owners, and no trademark rights to the same are claimed. Page 11 image courtesy of Thales from the
Australian Navy Photography Unit. Page 50 image courtesy of Mattias Ericson, Omnisys Instruments.
1 – The art of electronic product development

Creating an electronic
product involves balancing
a number of different
processes that must come
together to meet business
objectives. Projects must
be completed on time and
within budget. As electronic
products become more
intelligent, designers
must become 'smarter'
in the way they develop
products in order to meet
business objectives.
Developing the electronics
of a product
In a typical electronic product today, much of
the 'intelligence' of the product is embodied in
the embedded software running on a microprocessor
and the functionality of the large-scale discrete
components connected together on the board.
While software is easily updateable, the discrete
devices hard-wired on the PCB are essentially fixed
once the physical platform is defined.
Microprocessors created a revolution in electronics
development because they allowed portions of the
design problem to be moved into the highly fluid
and easily updateable realm of software. Moving
functionality into the 'soft' realm brings innumerable
benefits to the design process. Critical design
decisions can be made later, products can be brought
to market earlier and then upgraded in the field, and
functionality can be added to the product in software
without adding to the overall product cost.
The recent emergence of low-cost, high-capacity
programmable devices such as FPGAs (Field-
programmable gate arrays) is redefining the
boundaries between software and hardware, and
leading to another shift in how designers think about
adding intelligence to their products. These devices
allow the intelligent portions of the design to
encompass not only software in the traditional sense,
but the soft-wired blocks of hardware implemented
inside the FPGA.
As more of the functionality of products is moved
into the programmable domain, the three main
design processes – board design, programmable
logic design and embedded software development –
become increasingly dependent on each other.
As the design processes converge, the design systems
that engineers rely on to develop products must also
converge in order to maintain design efficiency into
the future.
2
1 – The art of electronic product development
The physical electronics platform
Building the physical platform of an electronic product
consists of taking discrete components, wiring them
together at the schematic level and processing the
circuit to provide the connectivity and component
information used to drive the layout and routing of
a printed circuit board. The PCB design is then used
to generate the files needed to fabricate and assemble
the board, provide design documentation and link
to the mechanical design of the casing and other
mechanical parts of the product.
With the increasing use of programmable devices
such as FPGAs, board designers are being challenged
to efficiently integrate these devices at the board
level. Unlike discrete components, the pins on a
programmable device do not have fixed functions.
Indeed one of the features of modern FPGAs is the
plethora of I/O characteristics that can be assigned
to the physical pins of the device and the complete
flexibility in setting the pin functionality.
3
Keeping it synchronized
While this flexibility has the potential to allow more
design freedom, for example the pin assignments of
the FPGA could be optimized to allow easier board
routing, it also creates problems. Propagating I/O
changes between PCB and FPGA designs manually
creates real headaches for designers and can have
a severe impact on schedules.
As pin counts on FPGAs escalate, the problem of
maintaining synchronization between programmable
devices and the board they reside on is becoming a
real barrier to successful design using these devices.
It is impossible to ignore the penetration of
programmable devices into mainstream design.
Moving forward, it is essential that board-level design
systems provide integration and synchronization with
programmable logic design to allow engineers to fully
harness the potential that such devices bring to the
design arsenal.
The programmable elements of a design
Conventional embedded design relies on code
running on discrete microprocessors to provide a high
degree of functionality and 'intelligence' to a design.
The software can be easily changed and updated
throughout the development cycle and can be
debugged interactively on the target execution
platform. Microcontrollers offer a range of in-built
peripheral devices that can be used by designers,
along with external discrete components, to create
the system platform for the software.
One of the drawbacks of this approach is that the
physical execution platform must be designed and
prototyped before the software development can
be completed. Also, decisions about the specific
microcontroller to target, the partitioning of functions
between hardware and software and the selection
of discrete peripherals must all be made early in the
development of the product. Changing any of these
physical attributes late in the design cycle can mean
significant re-engineering work.
Our customers
“ Altium Designer is a
feature-rich, flexible and
intuitive design solution
with no boundaries and
a very powerful user
interface. It has enabled
us to integrate state-of-
the art technology into
our electronic products,
which has allowed ANCA
to become a world leader
in the CNC Tool and
Cutter Grinder market.
“
Ian Rees , Electronics Engineer
ANCA Pty Ltd., Australia
The changing role of FPGAs
Programmable logic devices have traditionally been
used as a container for the glue logic that binds
the processor to peripheral devices and interface
components that comprise the complete system.
The recent emergence of large-capacity FPGAs at
relatively low cost has the potential to change the
way we think about programmable hardware, and
to redefine the boundaries between hardware and
software. They can be used to implement and
consolidate the various peripheral functions needed
by the processor system, or indeed to include the
processor itself – effectively creating a complete
system platform with programmable hardware.
This effectively makes the software execution
platform as easy to change and update during
development as the software that runs on it.
Functionality can be moved from software into
hardware, and vice versa. Peripheral devices can
be added or taken away from the core processor
to provide complete freedom in system definition.
To harness this potential, the design of the software
execution platform and the development of the
embedded software must move beyond loose
integration and become truly unified. Design systems
must support the movement of peripherals and the
processor itself into the programmable domain,
and provide a flexible hardware-software co-design
environment that intimately links FPGA design
and software development.
4
1 – The art of electronic product development

The electronic product development process

5
Bringing unity to electronic design
At its core, developing the electronics of a product essentially involves two levels
of design. The first is creating a physical platform using discrete, off-the-shelf
components mounted on a printed circuit board. The second involves the development
of the programmable elements of a design that are 'loaded' onto the physical design
during or after manufacture. Primarily these programmable elements consist of
embedded software running on processing execution platforms within the design,
and configurable hardware implemented in devices such as FPGAs.

As more functionality moves from discrete devices and into the programmable realm,
the various design processes involved are converging. As we move into the future,
efficient electronic product development will require the integration of board design,
programmable logic design and software development, and the bringing together of
the design management processes that oversee them.

Building the physical

platform – PCB design
(p.12)

Integrating
programmable
devices into the
physical design
(p.24)

Managing
components and
libraries
(p.30)

Moving the design

through to
manufacture
(p.36)

Harnessing the
power of
programmable
devices
(p.42)

Managing the entire

development process
(p.54)

is the first unified electronic product development system

that allows you to take a design from concept through to completion within a single
integrated environment.

6
1 – The art of electronic product development

Altium Designer – bringing unity to the design process

Electronic product development is a rapidly changing Design at the board level

playing field. The ready availability of high-capacity,
low-cost programmable devices is opening up new
ways of thinking about design, allowing more
intelligent, lower-cost products to be designed within
shorter development cycles. Traditionally, board-level
design, FPGA design and software development have
been treated as separate, independent processes
each carried out in separate design environments.
Moving into the future, this point tool approach will
increasingly present a barrier to efficient electronic
product development.
At Altium we believe that the future should be
available to every engineer, designer and developer,
and this belief has driven us to create Altium Designer
– a unique and unified system for electronic product
development with the future built in.
Altium Designer provides a single, unified application
that incorporates all the technologies and capabilities
necessary for complete electronic product development.
Altium Designer integrates board- and FPGA-level
system design, embedded software development for
FPGA-based and discrete processors, and PCB layout,
editing and manufacturing within a single design
environment. This, combined with modern design
data management capabilities, makes Altium Designer
the complete solution for electronic product
development – a solution that caters for both
today's and tomorrow's development needs.
In Altium Designer our proven strength in board-level
system design has been integrated at the platform
level with support for programmable design within
an FPGA environment. This provides a complete and
unified system that can be deployed across all
elements of the electronic product design process.
Altium Designer's board-level design capabilities are
second to none, and allow you to fully define and
implement all physical elements of your design. The
system features hierarchical, multi-channel design
capture, mixed-signal circuit simulation, pre-and
post-layout signal integrity analysis, rules-driven
board layout and editing, manual, interactive and
next-generation Situs Topological Autorouting,
complete CAM editing capabilities and an extensive
range of integrated physical component libraries.
With Altium Designer you can design the physical PCB platform,
create the programmable system hardware and develop the
embedded software that make up an electronic product, all
within a single, unified design environment.

7
Design with programmable devices
Altium Designer is unique in that it allows you
to change the way you think about developing
electronic products and fully exploit the potential
offered by today's large-capacity programmable
devices. By unifying FPGA design and software
development and using the programmable fabric
of an FPGA as a system platform, you can work
within an easily updateable soft realm where you
can change software and hardware with equal ease.
Altium Designer allows you take advantage of the
benefits to design efficiency and flexibility that this
brings, while leveraging your existing hardware and
software design skills.
embedded software development capabilities and
Altium Designer's integrated environment, you can
effectively migrate system functionality from the board
into programmable devices, allowing you to harness
these devices as a reconfigurable system platform.
What's more, with Altium Designer you are not
locked in to specific target devices. The system is
designed to be FPGA vendor-neutral and allows you
to work with a wide range of target programmable
devices from multiple FPGA vendors. This gives you
the freedom to choose the best device for each
application, and to easily move designs between
different FPGA devices. >>

Altium Designer provides you with extensive libraries

of FPGA-based components, including a range of
processors and peripherals that allow you to capture
your system design for FPGA implementation at the
schematic level. Using these components, the in-built

Our customers

“ Altium Designer provides

many features for the
design of state-of-the-art
hi-fi audio apparatus. It
has been evolving with
ongoing development and
offers us a state-of-the-art
design environment. Our
service department also
uses Altium Designer to
create manuals, since they
can save time by using
the schematics and PCB
data directly from
designers, which is great!
“
Mark M. Suzuki , Director
Engineering Dept.
Accuphase Laboratory, Inc., Japan

8
1 – The art of electronic product development

Altium Designer – bringing unity to the design process

Complete electronic product

development
Creating more intelligent electronic products
requires the convergence of different design
processes. Traditionally hard-wired elements are
increasingly moving into the soft-wired realm of
programmable devices. The design of the hardware
platform, the software and the software execution
platform are, by necessity, becoming more closely
linked. Altium Designer unifies the design of all these
elements to create the most productive and complete
electronic product development system available.

With Altium Designer, you are working within

a single, unified environment throughout the
development process. You can effortlessly
synchronize the schematic capture with the
PCB layout, maintain I/O synchronization between
FPGA designs and the boards they reside on,
and automatically ensure consistency of memory
and peripheral definition between the hardware
and software elements of the design.

This gives you unprecedented freedom to

make design changes at any point in the design
process and in any document within the project.
Altium Designer will ensure that the changes are
reflected in all relevant design documents in your The emergence of affordable high-capacity programmable devices allows you
project, ensuring complete design integrity. to move significant portions of your design off the hard-wired platform and
into a 'soft' environment. This has the potential to save design time, simplify
the board design and lower final manufacturing costs.
Unify your design with Altium Designer.

Seeing is believing!
Don't just read about the power of Altium Designer –
see it for yourself. Visit the DEMOcenter on the Altium
website at www.altium.com/Evaluate/DEMOcenter to
view on-demand video demonstrations that showcase
Altium Designer in action.

After all, seeing is believing!

9
At Altium we believe
that the future should
be available to every
engineer, designer and
developer, and this belief
has driven us to create
Altium Designer – a
unique and unified
system for electronic
product development
with the future built in.
2 – Building the physical platform – PCB design

The printed circuit board
connects together the
discrete components,
connectors and other
hardware that form the
physical platform of the
design. With increasing
component densities,
faster signal speeds and
transitions, and tighter
manufacturing tolerances,
successful board design
today, more than ever,
relies on design systems
that unify design definition
and physical layout.
Integrate design capture,
layout and verification
Altium Designer unifies the process of board design
by providing a single, integrated environment for
capturing design data, verifying the performance
of the circuit, and designing the PCB. All design
data is managed under a single PCB project within
Altium Designer, ensuring data integrity and
eliminating the need to manually recreate or
propagate design data between different applications.
Altium Designer natively supports the integration
of programmable devices into the physical platform
by unifying the board and FPGA design processes.
Altium Designer lets you achieve optimum board
routing solutions with FPGA devices while automatically
maintaining I/O synchronization. This saves design
time, minimizes errors and potentially lowers
manufacturing costs.
Electronic products are increasing in functionality
and design time is getting tighter. You simply can't
afford to fight with loosely-connected point tools
in order to complete a single project. With
Altium Designer you can take a design from concept
to completion within a single, unified, constraints-
driven design environment. Altium Designer provides
the integration you need to meet today's – and
tomorrow's – physical design challenges.
12
2 – Building the physical platform – PCB design
Develop boards that are correct by design
PCB design can be a minefield of conflicting
requirements. High-speed logic, dense packaging
technologies and large-scale programmable devices
place extreme demands on the PCB designer. All
physical design constraints, such as track clearances,
path lengths and trace widths need to be carefully
monitored and controlled to produce a successful
board design.
Altium Designer's powerful rules-driven design,
layout and editing environment gives you full control
over all aspects of the physical implementation of
your circuit. The system helps you create boards that
are correct by design, and ensures the integrity of
design data and compliance with all design constraints
at every stage of the design process from capture
through to board production.
With Altium Designer, we've placed the focus on
the intelligent automation of critical design processes.
Altium Designer peels away the design complexity
and allows you to easily navigate and manipulate your
design data. And the unified nature of Altium Designer
provides seamless integration between the board
design and all other aspects of the design process.
Altium Designer's hierarchical rules system and query-based scoping
allows you to rapidly and precisely define the physical constraints of
your design.
13
Full constraints-driven design
Being able to effectively define and apply physical
constraints to the board layout is crucial to achieving
high production yields. Altium Designer provides a
comprehensive set of design rules that cover all
aspects of the board design process. From electrical
and routing constraints through to signal integrity,
Altium Designer's hierarchical rules system provides
the power and flexibility to completely control all
crucial parameters in the design.
Set up and management of rules is centralized,
so you can define all your constraints quickly and
efficiently. You can selectively enable or disable
individual rules, and defined rules sets can be
exported or imported, allowing you to propagate rule
definitions between projects and save setup time.
Rules can be defined during design capture and
automatically propagated through to board layout.
Altium Designer dynamically monitors crucial design
rules, such as track width and clearance, as you
route, actively preventing violations. This lets you
concentrate on the routing task – Altium Designer
will take care of rule compliance and help you to
produce error-free boards.
Precise design rule scoping
Instead of a set of fixed, pre-defined rule scopes,
Altium Designer features a flexible query system to
define the objects that a rule is applied to. This gives
precise control over rule targeting, and makes the
process of constraining your design fast and efficient.
You can define multiple rules of the same type
targeted to different sets of objects, providing
hierarchical constraint definition. For example, you
can set up rules to route a net at one width on the
top layer, and a different width on the bottom layer
or close the solder mask over the vias on the bottom
layer, but not the top layer.
With Altium Designer you won't have any problems
knowing which rules are being applied to what. You
can navigate through the defined rules and have
Altium Designer highlight the objects targeted, or
simply right-click on an object to find out exactly
which rules are applicable to it.
Maintaining the accuracy of
source schematics
PCB re-spins cost time and money, so finding design
errors early is essential. Altium Designer introduces
the concept of project compilation to the capture
process to ensure the integrity and consistency of
the source files within a project.
At any time in the design process you can compile
your schematic project. At each compilation the
hierarchy and connectivity of the project is rebuilt and
verified, and the project is checked for electrical and
drafting errors. The project is automatically compiled
before any critical design actions, such as invoking
interactive project navigation or synchronizing the
schematics with the PCB layout. In this way the
system ensures that you are alerted to errors and
potential design problems as you design.
Altium Designer interactively highlights common
problems, such as duplicate component designators,
directly on the schematic as you work. This allows you
to correct errors as they occur without interruption to
your work flow.

Our customers With Altium Designer you can capture your application

“
with the confidence that your projects will be correct
We have been using Protel by design, and that the integrity of your source files is
for over 15 years and have constantly maintained throughout the design process.
observed Altium products >>
grow in strength to their
current high level of
reliability and integration.
Altium Designer’s
interactive routing features
streamline our design
process, while polygon
pours and split planes help
us create neat and
efficient board layouts.
“
Brian Sala
Digital Device Development Group, Australia

14
2 – Building the physical platform – PCB design
Develop boards that are correct by design
Complete design synchronization
Design is not a simple linear process. Changes and
updates are often made throughout the design cycle
and it’s easy for the final board layout to get out of
step with the source schematics. This can lead to
inadvertent errors in the design documentation or,
even worse, incorrect manufacturing files.
Altium Designer's unified environment supports full
and automatic synchronization of your entire board
project, and allows you to efficiently manage the
flow of changes between the PCB design and the
source schematics. Synchronization is bi-directional,
so you can manage changes made at both the
schematic and PCB level within a single operation.
You have full control over the direction in which
changes are propagated, and you can fully document
any changes by generating engineering change order
reports during synchronization.
This gives you the freedom to make design
updates at any stage during development, and the
confidence that the integrity of your entire design
project will be maintained from capture all the way
through to manufacture.
15
Navigating design data
Altium Designer brings clarity to design navigation
with a variety of innovative ways to filter, display and
edit your design data.
You can interactively browse through components,
nets or violations within schematic or PCB
documents, and drill down through the hierarchy
to highlight the individual primitives associated
with objects. As you browse, the graphical display
dynamically zooms to the selected objects and 'dims'
surrounding objects so you can easily focus on just
the pieces of the design you are interested in.
Altium Designer's innovative Board Insight system
turns your cursor into an interactive data mining
tool. As you hover the cursor within the PCB design,
essential information is displayed about the underlying
objects. When multiple objects are stacked, Board
Insight presents you with a graphical list that lets you
easily select or edit the properties of any particular
object under the cursor position.
Fully synchronized with the graphical schematic and
PCB editors are spreadsheet-like list views of your
design data. This provides an alternative editing view
that allows you to sort and filter all objects in the
design. The graphical and list views are dynamically
linked to provide true alternative views of your
design data.
Altium Designer
provides an extensive
range of features that
help you easily navigate
design complexity.
Bring structure to the design process
As designs become more complex, it is necessary to
partition the design into easily-manageable, logical
sections in order to effectively manage the capture
process. The Altium Designer schematic editor
facilitates the capture of designs of any complexity
by supporting a hierarchical approach to design. This
allows you to take both a top-down and bottom-up
view of the overall circuit, and to easily break the
design into functional blocks. There is no limit to
the number of sheets that can be contained within
a project, and the depth of hierarchy is unlimited.
Altium Designer provides easy navigation of the
hierarchical constructs within the schematic project.
You can, for example, automatically synchronize the
connection ports on sheet symbols with the schematic
subsheets they represent. You can navigate connectivity
up and down the hierarchy and trace a single
connection through the entire design.
Altium Designer's hierarchical environment and
extensive design navigation support help you bring
order to the capture process and facilitate a
structured approach to design capture.
Taking a hierarchical approach to
capture allows you to bring structure
to even the most complex designs.
With Altium Designer you can create
designs of unlimited sheets and
hierarchy depth, with full support for
multiple channels and repeated blocks
of circuitry.
Handling repeated circuit blocks
Many designs include extensive blocks of repeated
circuitry. Cutting and pasting circuit segments
achieves the overall design structure, but makes
editing difficult. You need to make repeated edits
to change the circuit or channel structure.
With Altium Designer you can handle repeated
circuitry intelligently within the schematic hierarchy.
You can reference a single subsheet multiple times
by including a repeat parameter in the referencing
sheet symbol. When you compile your project,
Altium Designer will automatically instantiate the
repeated blocks or channels programmatically.
Because the hierarchy is maintained within the
project throughout the capture process, you can
edit the source schematic at any time and recompile
to propagate the edits to all repeated blocks or
change the number of repeated instances.
As you move through to board design, Altium Designer
will automatically propagate channel instantiation
through to the PCB layout. This allows you to layout
one channel and then copy the placement and routing
across the remaining channels.
Altium Designer's intelligent handling of multi-
channel designs minimizes unnecessary editing and
maintains channel hierarchy and integrity throughout
the design process, allowing you to efficiently construct
repeated blocks of circuitry within a project.
16
2 – Building the physical platform – PCB design
Layout and route the PCB
As you move from capture through to board layout
and routing, Altium Designer supports the propagation
of the hierarchical structure of the project. The system
preserves the functional partitioning of the design
into the physical realm, and makes it easy to
scope physical constraints to drive the layout and
routing process.
You can automatically generate component and net
classes based on the schematic sheet hierarchy, which
you can then use within the PCB editor to create
targeted design rules. Schematic structure can also be
used to drive the creation of component placement
rooms, preserving the logical structure defined within
the source files.
Altium Designer's high level of integration between
schematic capture and PCB design allows design
intent to be preserved and propagated as you move
from the conceptual to the physical phase of the
board design. This smoothes the transition between
capture and layout, and provides a truly unified
design environment.
17
Complete interactive
routing system
A large portion of the board design effort is spent
on routing the connections. As board real estate
shrinks and component and pin densities increase,
the routing challenge becomes tougher. You need
to be able to squeeze the most from every square
millimeter of routing space.
Altium Designer provides you with a complete
interactive routing solution that combines rules-
driven, versatile interactive routing modes, predictive
track placement and dynamically optimized
connectivity to allow you to efficiently tackle any
routing challenge.
Begin routing a net from any starting point – you're
not constrained by the connection order – and
Altium Designer will automatically set the track width
to conform with the specific design rule for that net.
You can constrain routing to 90°/45° corners, allow
routing at any angle, or route with rounded corners –
all these options are easily selectable as you route.
As you near the end of a route, Altium Designer
can automatically and intelligently complete the
connection for you under complete design
rule compliance.
Versatile routing modes
In tight spots you can simply hug existing tracks
and Altium Designer will enforce the defined
clearance constraints, preventing you from creating
rule violations. Or switch modes and Altium Designer
will push existing tracks out of the way, under full
design rule compliance, to make room. To reroute a
track simply route the new path and Altium Designer
will automatically remove redundant copper,
making design rework fast and efficient. Automatic
loop removal is controllable at an individual net
level, allowing you to disable the feature for
particular connections.
To support routing to large BGA devices,
Altium Designer includes an automatic BGA
escape routing function that will fanout and place
stub tracks on all used pins of the device to make
connection paths accessible around the periphery of
the component. This eliminates the time-consuming
task of hand routing through dense BGA components.
The mix of interactive routing features in
Altium Designer provides a complete and unified
interactive routing environment that allows you
Our customers
to quickly and efficiently tackle any board routing
challenge. Full adherence to design rules at every
stage of the routing supports the constraints-
driven design process to allow you to produce
boards that are correct by design.
Autorouting support
Altium Designer comes equipped with Altium's
Situs Topological Autorouter engine, which is fully
integrated into the PCB editor. The Situs engine
uses topological analysis to map the board space.
Topological mapping provides greater flexibility in
route path determination and allows non-orthogonal
routing corridors to be more efficiently exploited.
Because the autorouter is a unified part of the PCB
design editor, you can run it at any time to route the
whole board, a single net or component, or anything
in between. The full power of the autorouting engine
is always at your fingertips.
Altium Designer also includes full bi-directional
support for the SPECCTRA® autorouter. During export
you can automatically preserve existing board
routing, control the mapping of Altium Designer
via rules to SPECCTRA pad stacks, and propagate
net classes to SPECCTRA to allow efficient generation
of class-based routing constraints.
“ Altium Designer is a very
valuable tool that helps
us through every phase
of electronic product
development. When
designing complex space
systems you have to be
sure that the design
software is up for the
task. Altium Designer and
Altium's NanoBoard allow
us to quickly implement
soft processors in FPGAs
that can withstand the
harsh environment space
electronics is exposed to.
“
Mattias Ericson, Engineer
Omnisys Instruments, Sweden
18
2 – Building the physical platform – PCB design
Design high-speed circuitry
Increasing clock speeds and fast serial interconnections
are bringing high-speed design considerations into
mainstream board development. High-speed signal
propagation places particular demands on the physical
design. Altium Designer supports high-speed design
with targeted design rules, complete system-level
support for managing differential signals, and
integrated signal integrity analysis.
Altium Designer's extensive rules system allows you
to create constraints targeted towards high-speed
design and differential signaling. For example, you
can set the maximum allowable length of nets,
control the number of vias in a net and match the
lengths of defined nets, automatically adding
accordion segments to traces as required. You can
also specify the maximum allowable parallel run
of traces to avoid crosstalk between nets, and fully-
constrain the physical layout of differential signal
pairs on your board.
19
Working with differential signals
Differential signaling is increasingly used in
mainstream board design. This is particularly true
for designs that use programmable devices. FPGA
vendors are including extensive LVDS capabilities in
even their lower-cost device ranges. LVDS is gaining
popularity because it not only improves reflection
noise, but also electromagnetic interference (EMI)
and power consumption. Altium Designer provides
system-wide support for differential signaling, and
lets you take full advantage of the LVDS capabilities
offered by today's FPGAs.
You can define differential signal pairs at the schematic
or PCB level – Altium Designer will propagate and
synchronize the definitions throughout the project.
With linked FPGA and PCB projects, Altium Designer
automatically maps a differential signal defined
within the FPGA project to appropriate signal pairs
in the physical design.
Altium Designer's PCB editor includes interactive
routing support for differential signals, allowing you
to simultaneously route both nets of a pair under full
design rule compliance. This provides integrated and
system-wide support for differential signals from
FPGA design right through to PCB layout.
Altium Designer
includes system-wide
support for differential
signaling, allowing
you to map LVDS I/O
from FPGA projects
through to the
physical design or
define differential
pairs on the board
schematics or PCB
layout. You can also
interactively route
both nets in pair
simultaneously
under full design
rule compliance.
Managing signal integrity issues
The fast edge transitions on modern logic families
are making signal integrity analysis a crucial part of
the physical design process. FPGAs in particular can
present significant problems. The wide range of
programmable I/O characteristics available on these
devices complicates the process of correctly terminating
signal lines to prevent excessive reflections.
With Altium Designer you can perform signal integrity
analysis at the capture stage, as well as during board
layout. This allows you to identify potential problem
areas, determine the correct termination strategy and
add the necessary components to the design before
moving to PCB layout.
With programmable devices, analysis is automatically
performed using the programmed I/O characteristics
of the device. This allows you to easily determine the
affect that modifying parameters such as slew rate
will have on circuit performance.
An integrated termination advisor lets you see the
effect of different termination networks on signal
integrity without the need to directly alter the circuit.
You can then sweep termination component values
to determine the optimum solution for each
connection node.
Full impedance, signal reflection and crosstalk
analysis can be run on your final board to check the
real-world performance of your design after layout is
complete. Signal integrity screening is built into the
Altium Designer design rules system, allowing you to
check for potential signal integrity violations as part
of the normal board DRC process.

Our customers

“ Altium Designer is much

easier to use than
competing software, and I
can’t think of any other
company that is anywhere
Altium Designer’s signal integrity simulator allows you to
compare proposed termination options and optimize
signal quality.

close to Altium in
support. The fact that
Altium Designer has such
an active user community
and Altium engineers
monitor and respond to
the forums is great.
Altium tools are the
perfect solution for PCB
designers making the
transition to FPGA design.
“
Dan Bay, President
Bay Enterprises, USA

20
2 – Building the physical platform – PCB design
Perform mixed-signal circuit simulation
Functional circuit simulation is a useful tool in
investigating aspects of circuit performance during
development. With Altium Designer you don't need
to move to a separate environment in order to make
use of simulation in your design flows. Mixed-signal
circuit simulation is a unified part of the capture
process, and is fully-integrated with the schematic
editing environment.
The Altium Designer simulation engine supports both
standard SPICE 3f5/XSPICE and PSpice models, ®
giving you the widest possible choice of component
simulation options.
Altium Designer integrates mixed-signal circuit simulation into
the design capture environment, and provides a powerful
waveform viewer that lets you fully analyze the generated
simulation data.
21
Altium Designer provides a full array of simulation
analyses, including advanced temperature and
parameter sweeping, Monte Carlo component
tolerance sweeps, pole-zero analysis and noise analysis.
Simulation results are displayed in the integrated
waveform viewer, which gives you a detailed and
accurate picture of circuit performance. You can
perform mathematical post-processing of simulation
results, overlay waveforms, display different
simulation types on a single graph and export the
waveform data.
Seeing is believing!
As you read through this
brochure you'll learn about
the numerous ways that Altium
Designer can increase the productivity of your design
team. Well don't just read about it! See Altium Designer in
action for yourself. Visit the DEMOcenter on the Altium
website at www.altium.com/Evaluate/DEMOcenter to
view on-demand video demonstrations that showcase
Altium Designer in action.
After all, seeing is believing!
With Altium Designer
you can take a design
from concept to
completion within
a single, unified,
constraints-driven
design environment.
Altium Designer provides
the integration you need
to meet today's – and
tomorrow's – physical
design challenges.
3 – Integrating programmable devices with physical design

Large scale programmable
devices are increasingly
finding their way into
mainstream electronic
product development.
They bring significant
benefits to the design
process, allowing functional
complexity to be moved
from hard-wired devices
into the programmable
realm. Today it is crucial
for design productivity that
these devices be seamlessly
integrated into the physical
design process.
Linking FPGAs with
board-level design
The extensive use of FPGAs within a system design
has some compelling benefits, not the least of which
is rapid development cycles. But time saved in the
development of the FPGA circuitry does not
automatically translate to faster time to market for
the end product.
One of the features of FPGAs is that the pin definition
of the devices is configurable. As well as defining the
function of each pin, you can select from a wide
range of electrical I/O characteristics. While this
provides immense design freedom, it also complicates
the process of incorporating these devices onto a
PCB. This can negate much of the time saved in the
FPGA development stage.
Altium Designer solves the problems of working
with large-scale programmable devices by providing
seamless linking of FPGA design projects with the
board design that incorporates them. This allows you
to gain the full benefits that programmable devices
have to offer, and opens the door to a new way of
approaching electronic product development.
24
3 – Integrating programmable devices with physical design

Concurrent FPGA and PCB design

Altium Designer provides a unified environment for FPGA configurations within a single FPGA project. For
the design of both the internal configuration of example, you can have one configuration targeting
programmable devices and the PCB platform that your FPGA development environment and another
they reside on. This facilitates complete FPGA-PCB for your production board design. This lets you
co-design and enables rapid development of FPGA- seamlessly move between development or production
based applications. builds of the FPGA and further facilitates concurrent
design of the FPGA and the physical platform.
Because the projects are linked at the design level,
you can begin the physical design process using a
default FPGA configuration while the FPGA is still in
development. As FPGA development progresses,
updated pin and I/O assignments can be transferred
to the board design project. The physical schematic
representation of the FPGA device is automatically
updated to reflect the updated I/O definitions,
keeping existing connectivity intact. These changes
can then be flowed on to the PCB.

Altium Designer abstracts FPGA design from the

physical constraints used to drive the FPGA place and
route process. This allows you to maintain multiple

Our customers

“ At 20th Century Fox,

Post Production Services,
there are frequent job
distractions interrupting
the progress of engineering
projects. Altium Designer
allows me to stop at any
point in the design cycle
and rapidly pick up where Altium Designer allows you
to structurally link FPGA
I left off, without losing and PCB design projects.
This allows you to
time constantly reviewing concurrently design the
FPGA logic and the board
my work. This, and the on which the FPGA resides.
Altium Designer will
autorouting speed, enable automatically synchronize
us to use prototype PCBs
rather than relying on
tedious hand wiring.
“ the designs to ensure the
projects stay in step.

Paul Pavelka, Sound Engineer

20th Century Fox, Post Production Services, USA

25
Managing I/O synchronization
Programmable devices such as FPGAs bring particular
challenges to the board design process. Typically
these devices have a large number of pins whose
I/O characteristics and functions are not fixed, but
determined by the application programmed into
them. Traditionally crucial I/O pins will be fixed by the
FPGA designer, with the FPGA place and route tools
free to assign the remaining pins as necessary.
The result at the board level is a pin configuration
that is generally far from optimal for PCB routing,
and the task of propagating I/O characteristics for
processes such as signal integrity analysis becomes
time consuming and error prone. Because Altium
Designer unifies the process of FPGA and PCB design,
it fully supports I/O synchronization between the PCB
and FPGA projects. This allows you to forward and
back annotate pin assignment changes and
automatically propagate I/O characteristics for signal
integrity simulation and differential pair management.
Altium Designer allows you to optimize connections on an
FPGA device at the board level to facilitate PCB routing,
with pin changes automatically propagated back to the board
schematics and FPGA project. This can significantly reduce
routing lengths and crossovers, and result in better utilization
of board real estate, lower production costs and shorter
design cycles.
Achieve optimal routing solutions
with FPGAs
As you deploy FPGAs within the PCB layout, you can
define sets of pins that can be interchanged at the
board level. From within the PCB design you can
manually swap pins to improve routing, or let
Altium Designer automatically optimize the
connection lines for easier board routing. With a few
mouse clicks you can then propagate pin changes
back to the FPGA project, and rerun the FPGA place
and route process with the new constraints. This
allows you to rapidly iterate through PCB and FPGA
routing options to arrive at an optimal system-level
design solution.
The unification of the programmable and physical
elements of an electronic product within
Altium Designer allows you to take full advantage
of the benefits that large capacity FPGAs offer.
Altium Designer allows you to effectively manage
the complexity FPGAs introduce at the board level,
and removes the barriers to their widespread
adoption within mainstream design.
26
3 – Integrating programmable devices with physical design

Debug JTAG devices at the physical level

Many of today's high-density FPGA devices come in
gridded packaging such as BGAs. It is often extremely
difficult or impossible to physically probe pins on
these devices to determine signal status during
system development. This can make physical
debugging of the circuit a difficult challenge.
Altium Designer leverages the JTAG capabilities of
FPGAs to allow you to dynamically investigate the
status of any pins on the device without the need
for physical access to the pins. JTAG boundary scan
allows for transparent monitoring of the signal status
on the device. When your Altium Designer system is
connected to a suitable development board, such as
Altium's device-independent NanoBoard, or your
JTAG-equipped prototype or production board,
the in-built, real-time JTAG Viewer allows you to
easily view the state of all the pins on any JTAG
supported component. This forms part of
Altium Designer's interactive FPGA development
methodology – LiveDesign.
The JTAG Viewer presents you with a footprint and
symbol view of the target device. You can manually
capture a snapshot of the pin status of the device,
or have the display update dynamically as the circuit
operates. You can hide the display of unused pins,
and select any single or group of nets within your
design to focus on. This allows you to easily monitor
the status of just the pins you are interested in.
Pin status can also be dynamically reflected and
displayed on the source schematics for your project
and the PCB layout. This allows you to easily trace
signals throughout the entire design.
With Altium Designer, you can monitor the status
of critical lines in real-time as you exercise the circuit
to determine correct state changes, and easily see
problems such as stuck signal lines. This ability to
easily view the status of the physical pins of an FPGA,
or indeed any JTAG device supported by the system,
provides a valuable aid in debugging your design at
the physical level when working with high pin-count
JTAG-enabled devices such as FPGAs.

Altium Designer’s enhanced JTAG Viewer gives you a real-time view

of the pin status of JTAG devices such as FPGAs while your circuit is
running, allowing you to debug system hardware without the need to
physically probe devices.

27
Altium Designer solves
the problems of
working with large-scale
programmable devices
by providing seamless
linking of FPGA design
projects with the
board design that
incorporates them.
4 – Managing components and libraries

Choosing an obsolete or
out-of-stock component
can lead to lengthy
production delays and
cost overruns. These types
of problems are not easy
to identify during design
and may not be picked up
until the project is in the
manufacturing stage.
This can be disastrous
for the overall success
of the product.
Manage component
information
The secret of trouble-free production is having the
ability to manage your component data at all levels
of the design process, and to ensure that the parts
specified are available, meet project costs, and are
sourced from your preferred suppliers. Altium Designer
provides comprehensive component data management
and information resources that allow you to maintain
control over parts usage, regardless of the size or
demands of your organization.
With Altium Designer you have the option to
implement a full database-driven component
information system, providing centralized control
over component data distribution and integration
with your company MRP or ERP systems.
Alternatively, you can deploy stand-alone integrated
libraries that provide component security and
portability when you don't need the power of a full
component information system. This gives you the
flexibility to deploy Altium Designer in a way that best
suits the needs of your particular design processes
and company structure.
30
4 – Managing components and libraries

Implement a database-driven component

information system

Altium Designer provides the capability to
dynamically place components directly from a
database library. Data can be accessed from any
ODBC-compliant data source such as a Microsoft
Access database, Excel spreadsheet, and most
engineering management systems. You can also
connect directly to OrCAD CIS databases. This
®
allows you to integrate Altium Designer with your
company procurement and inventory systems, and
provides full control over the selection and
deployment of components within a design.
You can configure the system to bring all relevant
component parameters into the board design as you
place components. This allows you to check critical
component properties, such as availability and cost,
as you design, and ensures that your designs contain
only parts from approved suppliers. Librarians can
ensure that only verified component models are used
by the design team, effectively enforcing design data
integrity throughout the project.
Altium Designer provides full synchronization of
database library data with parts used in your
schematic design. This allows you to generate
®
accurate Bills of Materials and to verify the availability,
cost and suppliers of all parts in your design at any
time in the design process. During BOM generation,
information can be synchronized and sourced from
both the design files and the component database,
allowing you to include up-to-date part costs and
procurement information in the BOM.
Altium Designer's database library capabilities allow
you to take full control over the management of
component data. You can minimize production
delays caused by out-of-stock items. You can limit
component selection to approved suppliers and
ensure component costs are within project
tolerances. And you can synchronize the design
process with part procurement, inventory
management and manufacturing.

Database-driven component information system

CAD librarians Inventory managers Manufacturing engineers Designers

Sch PCB Component

information On the fly
database tables assembly of
3D Sim component Schematic Simulation
information

PCB layout 3D modelling

Component model respositories
Integrated components
Component information management system Design creation

Design-specific
Dynamic data extraction & syncronization during BOM generation component information

Bill of materials

Altium Designer component information system

Altium Designer allows you to place parts directly from a

centralized database library. Information from the design files is
synchronized with the database during BOM generation to ensure
accurate, complete and up-to-date information is passed through Parts procurement PCB assembler

to procurement and manufacturing.

31
Design with integrated libraries

Altium Designer supports design with stand-alone
integrated libraries that consolidate all relevant
models, such as footprints and simulation subcircuits,
for each component in a single library package. This
allows you to compile and deploy self-contained
libraries that are fully-transportable and secure.
While you can work directly with source schematic
and PCB libraries, compiling them into integrated
libraries provides you with a single, secure source for
all necessary component information. You can attach
simulation and signal integrity models, as well as 3D
CAD descriptions of a component. When you compile
an integrated library, all models are extracted from
the sources and merged into a single, portable
format. You can then deploy the integrated library
for use in the end design. Using integrated libraries,
you can maintain the integrity of your source libraries
while providing designers full access to all necessary
component information.
Components in integrated libraries can also include
database-linked parameters. This lets you dynamically
link your integrated libraries to your component
management systems even when you're not using
full database libraries.
Once a design is complete, Altium Designer
allows you to automatically extract all component
information from your project to create a project-
specific integrated library. This allows you to store
complete component data with your project for
archiving, and ensures that you will always have
access to all the original component information
if you need to modify the design in the future.
The versatility and security afforded by Altium
Designer's integrated library format allows you to
control the deployment of stand-alone component
sources, and lets you manage component data
without the need for a full database component
information system.

Our customers

“ During the five years my

company used Protel 99 SE
we appreciated the tightly-
integrated environment
that allowed us to easily
Altium Designer provides full schematic symbol and PCB
footprint creation and editing features, allowing you to create
custom library components.

move between design

tools. The subsequent
transition to Altium Designer
was very easy and we
found the new and
improved features make
it a pleasure to use. Our
team’s productivity has
dramatically improved
thanks to the major feature
advances and its high level
of integration.
“
Dave Miller, Chief Electrical Engineer
Arete Associates, USA

32
4 – Managing components and libraries
Find components easily
Being able to quickly find a specific component is
paramount to efficient design, and Altium Designer
provides a versatile set of search options that allow
you to pinpoint the component you want with
minimum delay in stand-alone libraries or within
a database-driven component information system.
Installed libraries can be instantly selected
and browsed from within the Altium Designer
library panel. The panel will display the schematic
symbol and any available footprint or 3D model
information as you browse to allow you to quickly
locate a component.
You can search within installed system and project
libraries, or cover all libraries within a defined search
path. Altium Designer supports the use of complex
queries across all component parameters, so you can
find exactly the components you want based on any
relevant criteria. Query results can be browsed in the
same way as individual libraries, with symbols and
footprints dynamically displayed as you move through
the component list.
Altium Designer's integrated and flexible library
search features ensure that you can quickly and easily
locate the components you need from within even
the largest local or database-hosted parts collection.
33
Generate full library
documentation
It is important to be able to maintain up-to-date
information about the various libraries and
components within a system in order to ensure that
all parts are correct and conform to standards. With
Altium Designer you can quickly and easily generate
a comprehensive report detailing all the components
in a specified library.
Reports can be generated as a Microsoft Word
document or in HTML format, and can contain
comprehensive component parameter, pin and
model information and preview images of schematic
symbols, PCB footprints and 3D models. HTML
reports provide a hyperlinked list of all components
in a library, and can be easily deployed on an intranet
or via the web.
Altium Designer library reporting features combined
with support for database-driven and integrated
stand-alone library formats allows complete and
versatile management of all vital component data,
and facilitates the effective and efficient control and
propagation of library information throughout your
entire organization.
With Altium Designer
you can easily find
components in stand-
alone libraries or within
a database-driven
component information
system. As you browse
the results, you can
interactively view symbol,
footprint and other
model information.
Altium Designer
provides comprehensive
component data
management and
information resources
that allow you to
maintain control over
parts usage, regardless
of the size or demands
of your organization.
5 – Moving the design through to manufacture

The smooth transition from
design to manufacture plays
a crucial role in the success
of an electronic product.
Delays in component
procurement and
miscommunication with
manufacturers can lead
to delays and cost overruns.
Your product can be late
to market, or miss out
altogether. Altium Designer
helps bridge the gap
between design and
manufacture, and allows
you to actively manage the
generation and verification
of all manufacturing data.
Link design to manufacture
Altium Designer gives you the capability to link the
design and manufacturing processes, and edit and
verify your manufacturing files before they leave your
desktop. This allows you to actively manage the
transition to board fabrication and assembly, and
ensures that your design can be successfully
manufactured.
Altium Designer integrates complete manufacturing
file verification and editing into the design environment,
allowing you to load and inspect all manufacturing
data generated by the system. This allows you to
check for, and automatically fix, a number of
common fabrication problems, such as starved
thermals and solder bridging, before the design leaves
your desktop, and fully-configure the panelization and
rout paths for the board.
By linking design to manufacture, Altium Designer
saves time and minimizes costly design errors. You can
work efficiently with your manufacturing partners to
ensure your manufacturing files are fault-free and
completely ready for efficient fabrication and assembly.
map
36
5 – Moving the design through to manufacture
Centralize output
file generation
Manufacturing an electronic product requires a
multitude of output files to be generated. These can
include schematic prints for the handbook, assembly
drawings, fabrication files, drill files, pick-and-place
files, test point reports and the Bill of Materials (BOM).
To manage these outputs, Altium Designer includes
a specialized output job document (OutJob) that
can be added to a project to centralize output
generation. Any number of outputs can be
configured within an output job document,
and multiple output jobs can be added to a single
project. Once you have defined the sets of output
files you require, you can then generate all outputs
in a single batch process.
Because output jobs are stored within the project,
you can easily regenerate output files at any time.
You can work on multiple projects simultaneously,
maintaining independent output configurations and
file sets for each project. Output configurations can
be saved and reused in subsequent projects, allowing
you to set up multiple configurations for different
manufacturers and produce the correctly configured
file set for each fabrication and assembly house.
37
Output a full range of
fabrication and assembly files
Typically you will need to work with a variety of
electronics manufacturers, even within a single
project. Prototypes and production runs may be
manufactured in completely different facilities, and
each project will have its unique set of challenges
dictating different manufacturing techniques. In order
to efficiently work with multiple manufacturers, you
must be able to tailor your fabrication and assembly
file formats to suit.
Altium Designer provides a wide choice of outputs
to allow you to generate appropriate files for any
manufacturing requirements. This includes support
for all popular GerberTM formats, with full control over
generated layers and the manual listing or automatic
embedding of aperture information.
Altium Designer also supports the emerging ODB++
manufacturing file format. ODB++ is the most
intelligent CAD/CAM format available today,
capturing all CAD/EDA database, assembly and
PCB fabrication knowledge in one single,
unified database.
NC drilling and routing files, automatic pick and
place files, and all other relevant manufacturing files
can be easily generated, checked and edited from
within Altium Designer, giving you complete
versatility and security in moving your design
through to manufacture.
Altium Designer
OutJob files allow
you to consolidate
the generation of
all your assembly,
fabrication and
documentation
outputs at the
project level,
simplifying the
management of
output file
generation.
Generate accurate
Bills of Materials
Providing an accurate listing of parts for your project
is essential to efficient procurement and board
fabrication. Altium Designer allows you to completely
configure the information and format of Bills of
Materials (BOM), and generate BOM listings in
a variety of formats.
In Altium Designer, BOM generation dynamically
extracts parts data from your design, including
information from database parts libraries. This
ensures that the BOM is always accurate and delivers
the most current information to your manufacturers.
BOMs can be produced in a variety of formats for
import into virtually any manufacturing system.
Generate your BOM as a formatted XML spreadsheet,
an Excel worksheet based on a defined template, or
basic CSV file. You can even generate the BOM in
HTML format for web distribution.
With all formats you have complete control over
the fields included and the sorting of data. BOM
generation also supports assembly variants, allowing
you to generate data for any defined board variant
without having to manually edit BOM values.
Our customers
“ It was very important to
purchase software which
is very user-friendly, and
from a company that has
a reputation for excellent
customer service. It is
difficult to find in one
company a high level of
all these 4 ingredients:
quality, price, after-sales
service and ease of use.
Altium Designer possesses
all of those up to the
highest level of satisfaction.
“
Yogesh Patel, Design Engineer
Sanden Vendo America Inc., USA
Document your design
Good documentation in the form of print outputs
of your schematics and PCB layout is essential for
smooth progress through the manufacture and test
process. Altium Designer lets you take complete
control of the print process and generate precise
views of all your design documents.
With Altium Designer you can precisely define the
mix of PCB layers you want to print, set the scaling
and orientation, and see exactly how it will look on
the page before you print it. This allows you to easily
create custom printouts for fabrication proofs,
mechanical output, documentation, assembly, etc.
In each printout you define exactly the layers and
options you want to print. Also, for each printed
PCB layer you can selectively turn off and set the
print mode (draft or final) for each object type. You
can even save a print in the Windows® Enhanced
MetaFile (EMF) graphics format for inclusion in
external reports, manuals and documentation.
You can also include prints of simulation and signal
integrity waveforms in your design documentation,
as well as a range of configurable project reports
that include information such as component cross-
referencing and project hierarchy.
Altium Designer provides comprehensive printing support,
allowing you to fully document your design. All prints can
be previewed to ensure you generate the precise design
views required.
38
5 – Moving the design through to manufacture
Interface to
mechanical CAD
The ability to transfer data to and from mechanical
CAD tools is crucial in taking an electronic circuit and
turning it into a finished product. In many of today's
designs board-mounted components such as sockets,
switches, display modules and keypads must mate
seamlessly with cases and mechanical interfaces.
Altium Designer offers extensive interface support
for a wide range of mechanical CAD tools.
With Altium Designer you can import or export both
DXF and native AutoCAD® DWG files directly from
the schematic or PCB editor. Altium Designer also
includes bidirectional support for reading and writing
in IDF, making it easy to bring in board shape
definitions, and transfer out the assembled PCB.
Both the VRML and IGES formats enjoy extensive
support in the 3D mechanical CAD domain.
Altium Designer allows you to include 3D information
for components, such as component body shapes
for automatic extrusion, or full VRML or IGES models.
You can then use Altium Designer's PCB 3D viewer
to render an accurate 3D model of your board, and
export the complete assembly as an IGES file.
Altium Designer's Smart
PDF Wizard allows you to
create a fully-portable,
navigable PDF document
that can be read on any
system. The document is
navigable down to the
component and net level.
39
Collaborate by sharing
your design data
As you move from design through to manufacture,
you need to be able to share your design data with
a number of stakeholders who may not be directly
involved in the design process. These can include test
engineers, engineering management, documentation
specialists, manufacturers and clients. Static images
or prints are not easily navigable, and providing
source design files will not be an option unless the
recipients have the application to open them. Not
to mention the security issues!
Altium Designer supports secure collaboration with
all stakeholders by providing a powerful Smart PDF
Wizard that allows you to generate a portable and
navigable view of your schematic and PCB data. With
Smart PDF you can package your entire project or
selected design files as a PDF document that can be
viewed on any system with Adobe® Reader® installed.
The Smart PDF is bookmarked to provide complete
navigation of the design, with the ability to browse
and highlight components and nets in both
schematic sheets and the PCB layout.
To provide a higher level of interaction, Altium Designer
can be licensed as a free Viewer Edition for deployment
in situations where stakeholders need the ability to
open and interrogate any Altium Designer document.
A Viewer Edition license allows read-only access
to Altium Designer files, with full access to the
navigation, querying and reporting features of
the Altium Designer environment.
Smart PDF generation and the Altium Designer Viewer
Edition combine to provide a flexible and powerful
means of collaborating with everyone involved in
bringing your design project to completion.
By linking design
to manufacture,
Altium Designer saves
time and minimizes
costly design errors.
You can work efficiently
with your manufacturing
partners to ensure your
manufacturing files are
fault-free and completely
ready for efficient
fabrication and assembly.
6 – Harnessing the power of programmable devices

In a typical electronic
product today, much of the
'intelligence' is embodied in
the embedded software
running on a microprocessor.
Consider then the impact of
the emergence of low-cost,
high-capacity programmable
devices such as FPGAs. These
allow the intelligent portions
of the design to encompass
not only software in the
traditional sense, but the
soft-wired blocks of
hardware implemented
inside an FPGA.
The rise of embedded
intelligence
Programmable devices such as FPGAs continue to
rapidly increase in power and capacity as costs for
the devices plummet. Rather than just embedded
software, you can now imbue your products with true
'embedded intelligence' spanning both software and
programmable hardware.
By moving functionality from the board into
programmable hardware, you can shorten design
cycles while adding functionality with little or no
increase in manufacturing costs. The software,
processor and peripheral hardware can all be moved
inside the FPGA. All are easily changeable because
the entire system exists within a 'soft' realm. In this
scenario critical design decisions do not have to be
locked down until later in the design cycle, and the
entire intelligence of the product can be easily updated
right up until the product ships – or even beyond.
The bottom line is the move to a 'soft' design
paradigm gives you the freedom to approach
electronics design in a new way – a way that provides
complete flexibility in functional implementation and
opens the door to creating more intelligent products in
shorter time frames and with lower production costs.
42
6 – Harnessing the power of prorammable devices
Design using soft-wired components
Moving circuit functionality from the board into
programmable devices such as FPGAs can bring
enormous freedom to the hardware design process.
The logic inside the FPGA can be changed and
reconfigured throughout the design process, freeing
you from the constraints imposed by hard-wiring
components at the board level.
Conventional FPGA tools typically rely on extensive
HDL design experience and a working knowledge of
the architecture of the target programmable device.
Also, sourcing and instantiating large functional IP
blocks can be a challenge, entailing design flows that
are vastly different in concept from working with
off-the-shelf components hard-wired on a PCB.
Altium Designer has been created to allow you to
easily work with programmable devices using the
same skills and convenience currently enjoyed at the
board level. Within Altium Designer you can take
ready-to-use FPGA-based components and wire them
together at the block level within Altium Designer's
schematic editor to create the circuit design. This
allows rapid capture of system functionality for
implementation in an FPGA.
Altium Designer comes with extensive target-independent FPGA
component libraries that allow you to rapidly construct FPGA
system functionality at the block level.
43
Extensive FPGA component libraries
To facilitate this graphical approach to FPGA design,
Altium Designer includes extensive libraries of ready-
to-use FPGA components. Components range from
generic logic functions such as counters, multiplexers
and various logic gates, right through to complete
32-bit processors and high-level peripheral devices –
all you need to create the entire system functionality
of your design.
FPGA components are supplied as schematic symbols
linked to sets of pre-synthesized, pre-verified models
suitable for implementation on any FPGA device
supported by the system. The components are supplied
on a royalty-free basis, eliminating the difficulty of
sourcing FPGA-based IP from external suppliers and
allowing you to concentrate on the task at hand –
using the components to create your designs.
Within Altium Designer, the ability to simply drag
components from a library and wire them together
to create the FPGA design means that you can
work at a high level of abstraction with
programmable devices. You can harness the
potential of programmable devices without losing
the convenience of working with off-the-shelf,
ready-to-use components.
Target any FPGA
Altium Designer is a completely FPGA vendor-neutral
design environment. Use the supplied components to
construct your system functionality and you can
target the design to a wide variety of FPGAs from
multiple FPGA vendors including Actel , Altera ,
® ®
Lattice® and Xilinx®. This gives you complete freedom
in the specification of your target devices.
What's more, with Altium Designer there is no need
to settle on any particular target device before you
start a design. The system allows you to easily
retarget your design during development to any
suitable FPGA supported by the system.
During design processing, the system automatically
extracts the appropriate models for each FPGA
component in the schematic source files based on
the chosen target. These pre-synthesized models are
then instantiated as 'black boxes' during system
synthesis. Change the target device and you can
reprocess the design for the new FPGA without
having to make changes to the source files.
The ease of migration between programmable
devices means that you can progress system
development on one FPGA, and then retarget the
design to an alternative device for final production.
Another benefit is that you can easily compare the
performance of your system running on different
devices, even devices from different FPGA vendors.
Perhaps the most important advantage is that with
Altium Designer you are not locked in to any
particular FPGA vendor or device family. As new
devices are released, or as device availability and cost
fluctuate, you have the freedom to migrate your
design across devices to capitalize on opportunities
and avoid potential risks. >>

Our customers

“ The combination of
Altium Designer and the
NanoBoard allows our
design team to work
in a fully-integrated
development environment
which speeds the product
to market and enables us
to use the most secure
technology available.
Without Altium Designer
we could not afford to
design single-chip
solutions for our systems,
in terms of either cost or
“
time-to-market.
Max Miller,
Technical Products Division
Ushio America Inc, USA

44
6 – Harnessing the power of prorammable devices
Design using soft-wired components
Mix HDL and schematic capture
>> The wide range of FPGA components supplied
with Altium Designer will allow you to create most,
if not all, of the system functionality you require. But
there will always be occasions when you need to
create custom IP blocks, or define particular logic
functionality using a hardware description language.
Altium Designer supports both VHDL and Verilog®
to capture design logic, and allows you to easily
incorporate HDL source files within your overall
system schematics.
Source HDL code can be linked into the overall
schematic design through the use of sheet symbols
that provide a graphical representation of the HDL-
based logic entities, which can be automatically
generated from the source HDL. These sheet symbols
are then placed within the schematic editor and
connected to other sheet symbols and FPGA
components to graphically define system connectivity.
45
You can also create your own custom FPGA
components from these source files. The system
provides extensive tools to allow you to take blocks
of logic you have defined, and synthesize and process
these blocks into FPGA components suitable for
inclusion in the Altium Designer FPGA libraries. This
allows you to easily expand the functionality available
in the FPGA component libraries and to generate
logic functions that are ready for use in other designs
or by other team members.
Altium Designer features in-built VHDL/Verilog
synthesis, and also allows you to seamlessly use
external synthesis engines such as XST®, Altera and
Synplicity®. Similarly, Altium Designer includes a VHDL
functional simulation engine, and also supports
transparent interfacing to ModelSim® and Active-HDL.
With Altium Designer you can use HDL to capture as
much or as little of the design as you need. You have
complete freedom to mix VHDL and Verilog sources
with schematic-based FPGA components to create
your overall system definition. This allows you to
choose the most appropriate capture method for
each step of the design process.
Altium Designer allows
you to capture FPGA-
based designs using a
mix of schematic and
HDL source files. This
allows you to take
advantage of the block-
level design to capture
system structure, while
retaining the flexibility
to define blocks of logic
using HDLs.
Test using FPGA-based
virtual instruments
One of the key and unique advantages of
Altium Designer is that you can design at the
component level within the programmable fabric of
an FPGA. The FPGA components are supplied as
pre-verified, pre-synthesized blocks and are ready to
use straight from the libraries – you don't need to
verify the functionality of these blocks. You will,
however, want to test the overall functionality of the
system formed by these components.
To do this, Altium Designer provides you with a set
of FPGA-based virtual instruments that can be used
in an analogous way to bench test instruments at
the board level, allowing you to probe and stimulate
interconnections within the system running on
the programmable device. The virtual instruments
are incorporated in your design at the schematic
level and connected to the appropriate nets within
the design.
When the design is processed and downloaded
to the programmable device, the Altium Designer
system communicates with the instruments via a
secondary JTAG chain established within the FPGA.
Soft front panels then allow you to stimulate and
interrogate your circuit interactively, allowing you to
debug problems and verify circuit performance. You
can then make changes to your design, reprocess it
and repeat the testing.
Altium calls this interactive development process
LiveDesign, and it minimizes the reliance on system-
level simulation and allows you to rapidly debug your
FPGA-based system design in a 'hands-on' way. Rather
than simulating the design to see if it should work,
you can run the real hardware and/or software and
test whether it actually does perform as expected.
With its extensive range of virtual instruments and
interactive test environment, Altium Designer brings
the convenience and speed of board-level debug
to the FPGA design process and allows you to
work interactively with FPGA components during
system development.
46
6 – Harnessing the power of prorammable devices
Work with processors and embedded software
The rise of the microprocessor revolutionized
electronics design by allowing functionality to be
moved from the hard-wired constraints of the board
to the easily-changeable realm of software. This
allowed the 'intelligence' of the product to be
separated to some degree from the underlying
hardware, and provided a development methodology
that allowed more features and functionality to be
embedded into the product without increasing the
hardware cost, component count or board real estate.
The availability today of high-capacity, low-cost
programmable hardware in the form of FPGAs has
the potential to change the way you think about the
design process by allowing you to create both the
software and the execution platform that it runs on
in an easily-changeable and updateable realm. By
moving system processing functionality inside an
FPGA, you can simplify and shrink the board design,
reduce overall system design time and change both
the software and the hardware execution platform at
any time in the design process. You can even update
the entire system in the field, allowing extensive fixes
and feature upgrades to be done without altering the
physical hardware.
47
FPGA-independent soft processors
Altium Designer offers you a wide choice of processor
platforms, allowing you to work with a range of soft
processors or hybrid hard-processor/FPGA devices. This
means you can choose the appropriate execution
platform for your specific application.
Altium Designer comes supplied with a versatile 32-bit
RISC soft processor – the TSK3000 – and a range of
general purpose 8-bit soft processors. These
processors are target-independent and can be used
on any suitably-sized FPGA device supported by the
system. Like all Altium Designer FPGA components,
the processors are supplied pre-synthesized for a wide
range of target devices.
Altium Designer's TSK3000, internally based on a
Harvard architecture, features a simplified memory
structure and sophisticated interrupt handling to
make coding simpler. It has been specifically designed
to simplify the development of 32-bit systems
targeted for FPGA implementation and to allow
the migration of existing 8-bit systems to the 32-bit
domain with relative ease and low risk. The processor
also simplifies the connection of peripherals with
support for the Wishbone OpenBus architecture.
Altium Designer allows you to target a range of processors,
from target-independent and FPGA vendor-specific soft
processors, hybrid hard processors within an FPGA, and discrete
processors connected to stand-alone FPGAs. What's more, the
system provides hardware and C-level design compatibility
between supported processors.
Third-party processor support
Altium Designer supports a range of soft processors
supplied by major FPGA device vendors. Because these
processors are targeted and optimized for specific
FPGA device families, these processors can offer a
higher level of performance, but lock you in to specific
target FPGAs. The Altium Designer system includes
special schematic-based components that provide
direct access to these vendor-specific soft processors,
such as the Xilinx MicroBlazeTM, from within the Altium
Designer environment. This allows you to work with
these processors in the same way that you design with
the native Altium Designer soft processors – simply
place the components from the libraries to construct
your system.
Easily modify or change the
execution platform
In traditional board-level design flows, the hard-wired
execution platform is defined and fixed early in the
design process. The processor is selected, the
peripherals specified and the partitioning of functions
between hardware and software is tied down at the
start of the design cycle to allow prototype hardware
to be manufactured and software development to
proceed. Discovering late in the design cycle that you
need to implement a function in dedicated hardware
because the processor is running out of steam can
mean major re-engineering and extensive delays in
manufacturing new prototype boards. This can play
havoc with release schedules.

In a similar way, you can target hard processors within
hybrid processor/FPGA devices, or discrete processors
such as ARM® and PowerPC devices coupled to an
external FPGA. Altium Designer provides 'wrapper'
core components that are implemented within the
FPGA to interface to the processor. This gives you full
access to the power and performance of these devices
from within the Altium Designer environment.
Altium Designer has been created to overcome these
barriers and give you complete freedom to change
both the software and the execution platform that it
runs on throughout the development process. It does
this by allowing you to harness the potential of
large-scale programmable devices to provide a soft-
wired execution platform in which the processor,
peripheral devices and glue logic can all be easily
changed and reconfigured 'on-the-fly' to

Our customers accommodate design modifications. >>

“ A recent project involved

the schematic capture of
the design, design of the
embedded firmware, and
layout and routing of an
8-layer, 13" x 8" board
and a second smaller PCB.
We had to supply five sets
of working and tested
boards. The customer had
estimated one year to
complete the project.
With Altium Designer we
delivered it in 110 days!
“
Herb Winters, Owner
Efficient Computer Systems, USA

48
6 – Harnessing the power of prorammable devices
Work with processors and embedded software
>> For example, within Altium Designer you
can start development using the included device-
independent 32-bit soft processor and soft peripheral
components. If you subsequently need to improve
the performance of the system in certain respects,
you can migrate specific functions from the processor
to dedicated soft-wired hardware. Alternatively,
you could change to a more highly-optimized FPGA
device-specific soft processor such as those supplied
by the FPGA vendors, or move to a hybrid FPGA that
includes a hard processor core.
Because Altium Designer provides hardware- and
software-level compatibility between processors and
lets you work in a consistent way regardless of the
target, you are free to choose the appropriate
processing platform for your specific application. If
necessary, you can even change processors during
development with minimal system re-engineering.
49
Connect processor peripherals
Altium Designer simplifies the connection of
processors to peripherals and memory by making
extensive use of the Wishbone OpenBus, an open
source standard that has been specifically designed
for processor/peripheral interconnect within a chip.
The Altium Designer FPGA component libraries
include configurable Wishbone interconnect
components that can be used to connect both
peripheral devices and memory to the processor
core at the schematic level. Once placed, you can
configure these devices directly on the schematic
sheet, adding and defining devices as needed. The
schematic symbol is automatically updated to include
the defined sets of connections. You can then simply
add Wishbone-compatible peripheral and memory
controller devices from the supplied FPGA component
libraries to complete the processor system.
The ease and simplicity that Wishbone OpenBus
brings to system configuration allows you to rapidly
define system functionality, and lets you reconfigure
or add hardware functionality to the execution
platform at any stage of the development process.
Altium Designer makes the connection of processor peripherals
and memory easy with extensive support for the Wishbone
OpenBus interconnect standard. Connection components can
be conveniently configured on-sheet, making adding peripheral
components fast and easy.
Develop and debug embedded
software
Altium Designer's unification of the electronic product
development process extends to the creation of
embedded software running on FPGA-hosted
processors. From within the Altium Designer
environment you can create and edit your code,
compile and simulate your program and undertake
complete source-level debugging on the target system.
Altium Designer includes full compiler tool chains for
all supported processors. The compilers are based on
Altium's advanced Viper compiler framework, which
provides fast, highly-optimized code that is finely
tuned to the target processor architecture. The Viper
technology provides C-level code compatibility across
all processor platforms, allowing you to easily migrate
your application code between processors. This
complements the hardware-level processor
compatibility and facilitates complete system
migration between different execution platforms.
All Altium Designer processors feature on-chip debug
capabilities. When the design is downloaded to a
suitable FPGA development board, such as Altium's
NanoBoard, Altium Designer communicates with the
processors via a secondary JTAG communications
chain established within the FPGA. You can then
debug your software from the source code or
disassembly view, with full control over processor
execution. Altium Designer natively supports the
simultaneous debugging of multiple processors,
allowing independent debug sessions for each
processor running in the design.
By bringing together the development of embedded
software with the design of the execution platform
that it runs on, Altium Designer allows you to take
a new approach to electronic product development.
You can defer critical design decisions until much
later in the development process, you can change
the critical elements of the design throughout
the development cycle, and you can migrate
functionality between software and hardware.
With Altium Designer you have complete freedom
to tailor the design implementation to your specific
embedded application.
50
6 – Harnessing the power of prorammable devices
Download and interact 'live' with your design
One of the problems of designing with programmable
devices is that it's difficult to visualize what's going
on inside the device. While you can monitor the pins
of the device, you have no physical access to the
signals within the operating circuit. You are
effectively disconnected from the design.
A unique aspect of Altium Designer is that it
allows you to connect live to the programmable
elements within your design, and interact with the
system under development. With the addition of
a LiveDesign-enabled development board, such
as Altium's target-independent NanoBoard, you
can process and download the design to the FPGA
and dynamically interact in real-time with active
devices such as the processors and Altium Designer's
virtual instruments. Working in this way you can
take an interactive and iterative approach to the
design of systems within FPGAs, minimizing the
traditional reliance on simulation. Altium calls
this process LiveDesign.
To manage the LiveDesign process, Altium Designer
provides a centralized interface from which you can
process and synthesize your project, transparently
invoke the FPGA vendor tools for device-specific
mapping and routing, and download both the
hardware and software program files to the
target devices.
51
Once programmed, you can interact with active
devices through the interface. You can monitor and
set signals within the FPGA-based system using
virtual instrument 'soft' control panels, and initiate
software debug sessions for all processors running in
the system. As you make changes you can reprocess
and download the new software or hardware and
immediately see the effect of the changes.
At the pin level, you can monitor the I/O status of the
target programmable device and dynamically reflect
this status to the source FPGA project schematics.
Altium Designer can also provide a live display of the
pin status of FPGAs from within the PCB editor.
By providing the appropriate connections on your
PCB design, you can even connect your prototype
or production board to the system via the NanoBoard
and continue the LiveDesign process on your
target hardware.
The interactive nature of the LiveDesign process
brings the entire development process to life, and
allows you to rapidly develop and debug FPGA-based
systems. Altium Designer gives you the power to
reach into and control the programmable elements
of your design, and connects you 'live' to your
system during development.
The bottom line is the
move to a 'soft' design
paradigm gives you the
freedom to approach
electronics design in a
new way, a way that
provides complete
flexibility in functional
implementation and
opens the door to
creating more intelligent
products in shorter time
frames and with lower
production costs.
7 – Managing the entire development process

Physical design,
programmable logic design
and embedded software
development are no longer
independent processes, but
must be efficiently managed
as a single design flow to
achieve design efficiency.
Altium Designer unifies the
entire design process and
allows you to manage all
aspects of development
within a single, integrated
design environment.
Bring unity to the
design process
The development of electronic products is a juggling
act that balances the drive to embed more and more
intelligence into a design with the time needed to
create, implement and test the application. In order
to compete in this convergent design landscape you
need to be able to efficiently manage projects and
data that transcend traditional tool boundaries.
Navigating product development through a landscape
of loosely-connected point tools creates barriers to
design efficiency, forcing you to work around data
translation and project synchronization issues. Even with
superficial integration between tools, you still need to
deal with multiple design and project management
environments in order to develop a single product.
Altium Designer brings efficiency and enhanced
productivity to electronic product development
by providing platform-level integration of all design
processes, and giving you a unified project and
document management infrastructure that supports
the convergence of traditionally separate design
disciplines. Altium Designer allows you to bring
together the discrete hardware, programmable
hardware and software that make up a system,
and take a design from concept to completion
in less time than has previously been possible.
54
7 – Managing the entire development process
Manage all projects within a unified environment
Altium Designer provides a single, unified environment
for the creation and management of all of the
different project types that go to make up your
complete electronic product. What's more,
Altium Designer allows you to link these projects
to define the overall structure of your design.
The different project types exist in their own right
and can be worked on independently, but are linked
in a logical way. For example, a PCB project is linked
to the FPGA projects for the programmable logic
devices it contains. An embedded software project
is linked to the processor contained in the FPGA
project that defines the execution platform. Because
Altium Designer understands the structural links
between projects, it can intelligently and
automatically manage the flow of essential data
between them.
55
Change the pin assignment of an FPGA at the board
level, for instance, and Altium Designer understands
that this data must be synchronized with the PCB
source schematics and with the FPGA project
constraints that drive FPGA place and route. You
don't need to manually propagate this data between
different design environments.
Similarly, when you add memory or peripheral
hardware to a processor within an FPGA project,
Altium Designer can automatically generate the C
header files necessary to address this hardware within
the software project.
With Altium Designer, the ability to create and link,
within a single environment, all of the different
projects that go to make up your final product design
brings design efficiencies not possible with traditional
point tools. This efficiency translates into shorter
design cycles and higher productivity for your entire
design team.
Manage all your design documents

A single electronic product development project
can generate literally hundreds of design-related
documents. And each document can go through
many revisions during the course of the development
process. As designs grow in complexity, so does the
need to systematically track and control the storage
and revision of design documents. Increasingly
organizations are implementing document version
control systems to manage this process.
Altium Designer provides comprehensive and versatile
support for linking to external version control systems,
as well as the ability to locally track the history of your
design documents. Altium Designer can interface to
any third-party version control system that supports
the Source Code Control Interface (SCCI), Concurrent
Versions System (CVS) or Subversion (SVN) standards.
This includes commercial systems such as Microsoft
Visual SourceSafe and most popular open source
version control applications.
Our customers
From within Altium Designer you can add design
documents to any specified repository within the
version control system and perform all common
version control tasks such as document check-in and
version labeling. This allows you to manage your
documents without leaving the Altium Designer
environment.
Even if you don't have a full version control system
operating within your organization, Altium Designer
allows you to easily track the history of documents
within a project at a local level. Each time you
save a file, Altium Designer will automatically
store a copy of the original file to create a full
history of the document changes. You can label
milestone versions and add comments to the history
files to document changes.
In Altium Designer, full support for external
document version control and local document
history management combine to give you flexibility
and security in the handling of your important
design documents.

“ As a contractor, I sometimes
use competitive products,
but I always try to show
people how advanced
Altium Designer is
Altium Designer's Storage Manager panel allows you to view and
manage the physical storage of all design documents associated
with a project and seamlessly work with version control systems.

compared to what they’re

using. It is absolutely the
best value, it brings a new
level of system development
integration to the electronic
design community, and
Altium gives FPGA designers
vendor independence which
allows me to make real
comparisons with the big

Altium’s support is second

to none.
“
three vendors. Furthermore,

Tony Karavidas, Owner

Encore Electronics, USA

56
7 – Managing the entire development process
Graphically compare PCB and schematic documents
Maintaining a document's history is one challenge.
But being able to efficiently determine what has
changed between versions of a document is
crucial to efficient management of documents
during development.
While most version control systems allow you to
easily see the differences between versions of text-
based files, graphical documents such as schematic
diagrams and PCB layout files present a whole new
set of challenges. Changes to these types of
documents can be difficult to pinpoint, particularly
where the change does not affect connectivity. For
example, in a PCB layout you may reroute a particular
connection in order to improve signal integrity. On
a complex board, spotting this change is almost
impossible by visually comparing the two documents.
57
Altium Designer includes a powerful graphical
differencing engine that allows you to compare
file versions on a spatial basis, as well as on the
connectivity level. This allows you to quickly and
easily identify even the most subtle graphical
differences between versions of schematic and
PCB documents.
The comparison features are fully-integrated with
Altium Designer's storage management and
versioning facilities, allowing you to easily compare
your current document with versions in the local
history or version control repository. Or indeed to
compare any two previous versions of a document.
The graphical comparison features combine with
Altium Designer's comprehensive version control
support to provide the capabilities you need to
effectively manage all your design documents, and
maintain the integrity of your design files throughout
the entire design process and across your entire
design team.
With Altium Designer you can easily track down even
minor spatial differences between different versions of
graphical documents.
Altium Designer brings
efficiency and enhanced
productivity to electronic
product development by
providing platform-level
integration of all design
processes, and giving you
a unified project and
document management
infrastructure that
supports the convergence
of traditionally separate
design disciplines.
8 – Deploying Altium Designer with confidence

When you deploy
Altium Designer across
your organization, you
not only get the most
productive design system
available, you also get the
security of knowing that
Altium is committed, at
every level, to ensuring
your complete success.
Your success is our success
At Altium we believe that the success of our
company is ultimately dependent on the success of
our customers. When you invest in Altium Designer,
we make it our priority to ensure that you have the
backup you need to use the system successfully, and
to be successful in bringing your design to market
on time and on budget. What's more, we believe
that this backup should be available to all Altium
customers and not tied to some mandatory high-cost
maintenance contract.
When you deploy Altium Designer you get the
security of knowing that you are investing in a design
solution that is continually developed to keep pace
with changes in design and electronics technology.
Altium Designer is a solution that will carry you into
the future and grow with your expanding requirements.
And most importantly, it's a solution backed by
more than 20 years' experience in the electronic
design industry.
60
8 – Deploying Altium Designer with confidence
More than
what's in the box
At the core of Altium is the belief that every engineer,
designer and developer should have access to the best
possible design tools. That's why we continually
develop our products and constantly add new and
innovative capabilities to our design solutions.
Unlike other design software vendors, we won't
make you pay for every update or feature
enhancement to your product. When you purchase
an Altium Designer license we maximize your return
on investment by giving you free access to regularly-
released service packs. These service packs bring new
technologies, additional device support and
enhanced features to your Altium Designer system
to ensure that you are always kept up-to-date with
the latest design technology.
The Altium Library Development Center continuously
develops new and updated libraries under its
ISO 9000-certified quality assurance program. These
libraries are freely available to all Altium Designer
customers, and ensure you have unrestricted access
to the latest electronic components, packaging
technologies and device models.
61
Active design community
and web resources
Altium's presence on the web provides a hub for
participation in the active community of designers
and developers using Altium Designer. One of the
most valuable resources to your company is the
Altium-hosted online forums that link Altium Designer
customers with one another, as well as with our
product developers, application engineers and
support staff.
These forums provide an extensive and friendly peer
support network, and we encourage all of our
customers to participate in the forums to both gain
from and contribute to the wealth of experience and
knowledge present in the Altium Designer community.
The forums are supported by an extensive online
Knowledge Base and product resources. Browse the
Altium website and you'll find program downloads
and updates, additional examples and reference
designs, updated documentation and tutorials, and
information on programmable devices and third-party
development boards.
The greatest resource we have as a company is
the people that use our software. We are dedicated
to promoting an active Altium Designer community
so that all of our customers can benefit from
this resource.
Global customer care focus

Ensuring your success in using Altium Designer to
complete your projects on time and within budget is
something we take seriously at Altium. When you
initially deploy Altium Designer within your
organization, you want your engineers to get up-to-
speed as quickly as possible to ensure continuity of
productivity. That's why we give you three months'
free unlimited phone and email support with every
Altium Designer license.
This gives you instant access to Altium's global
network of direct Sales & Support centers and Value
Added Resellers, whose teams of professional and
skilled support engineers are ready to deal with your
queries at a local level. These engineers are
experienced with both Altium Designer and the
electronic product development process, and can
provide you with timely help on all aspects of the use
of your Altium Designer system.
Our customers
Our front-line support engineers are backed by
Altium's Global Customer Care team. This worldwide
team provides a top-level resource with direct access
to Altium's R&D resources. The Global Customer
Care team proactively monitors critical support issues
and ensures that the correct resources are made
available to solve your problems in an efficient and
timely manner. They also ensure that all the information
generated at the local level and through the online
Altium forums is captured and fed into Altium's
extensive web-based Knowledge Base, which
provides a valuable resource for all Altium Designer
customers on an ongoing basis.
Our multi-layer support system is specifically designed
to help you overcome any obstacles to successful
electronic product development with Altium Designer.
By doing this, we seek to ensure that you take full
advantage of the design capabilities of the system
and develop your products in the most efficient
manner possible.

“ A complex ten-layer board

we developed for a customer
required two levels of laser
drilling, ‘dog bone’ routing
strategies and layer-specific
impedance matching of
microstrips and differential
pairs. Altium Designer’s PCB
Layout directives allowed us
to very quickly integrate
constraints for track widths
and insulations on the
various layers so we could
then find them directly on
the PCB, which saved us
several days of development
and removed any risk of
error while routing the board.
“
Frederic Mailles,
Design & Production Coordinator
Multi Video Designs, France

62
8 – Deploying Altium Designer with confidence
Flexible training resources
We help your engineers, designers and developers
get the most from their Altium Designer system
by offering a complete range of structured training
resources. These resources are designed to get you
productive with Altium Designer in the shortest
possible time.
The training starts as soon as you install the software.
Invoke the online Knowledge Center built into the
software, and a dynamically-updated panel provides
interactive and context-sensitive guidance on the
operation of the system. The online Knowledge
Center tracks what you are doing and provides
specific help with your current task. You can also
access the extensive Altium Designer documentation
library for more in-depth information on the features
and concepts within the system.
Altium Designer also comes with a vast array
of examples that demonstrate the capabilities of
the system. Examples range from simple circuits
designed to highlight specific features, through to
complete reference designs that cover the entire
development process.
63
To complement the learning resources within the
software, the Altium website hosts extensive, free,
downloadable training materials to allow your
engineers to train themselves at minimum cost,
and then extend this training to others in the
organization.
If you need to take your Altium Designer skills to
a new level, Altium offers regular targeted off-site
training courses delivered by highly-skilled
professionals. These courses cover all aspects of
the electronic product development process with
Altium Designer, and cater to all levels of experience,
from beginner to advanced. Off-site courses
represent a cost-effective way to quickly enhance
the skills of your designers.
When you have a group of engineers to bring up-to-
speed quickly but don't want to send them off-site,
then let us come to you. Your local Altium Sales &
Support Center can arrange for training courses to
be delivered within your workplace, minimizing
downtime for your engineers.
Whatever level of training you require, we have a
solution that will suit your available time and budget
and allow you to maximize the design productivity of
your most valuable asset – your staff.
Fully-customizable
design environment
Everyone likes to work in a slightly different way, and
Altium Designer accommodates this by allowing you
to completely customize the application interface to
suit the way you want to work, and the screen
configuration of your system.
The Altium Designer interface provides for individual
customization of menus, toolbars and shortcut keys.
In fact, the entire Altium Designer desktop is
configurable. Workspace panels can be docked,
free-floating, stacked in a variety of ways, or set
to collapse when not in use. What's more, multiple
desktop layouts can be saved and recalled, allowing
task-specific customization of the environment.
The flexible positioning of all parts of the interface
allows you to make full use of multiple-monitor
setups. Indeed, the increased productivity afforded
by the additional screen real estate makes multiple
monitors a must for optimum design efficiency.
The flexibility and degree of customization intrinsic
in the Altium Designer interface allows each designer
to create a tailored environment that suits the way
they work as individuals, and promotes optimal
design efficiency.
Our customers
“ Thanks to Altium
Designer’s intuitive
design environment and
multitude of functions,
creating high-density,
multi-layer and high-
speed board designs is
easy. Altium Designer
perfectly fits with the
fast evolution of
consumer electronics
we develop and order
in mass production.
“
Hamid Belaid, Layout Designer
NEOTION, France
Develop full custom
add-on applications
Altium Designer includes a powerful, in-built scripting
system that gives you programmatic access to all of
the system resources and allows you to customize
your Altium Designer deployment by creating simple
macros or complete form-driven add-on applications.
The scripting system supports multiple scripting
languages such as VBS and JavaScriptTM, and can be
used programmatically to access all features of the
system and create custom interfaces to your company
management systems.
Through the scripting system you have platform-level
access to all processes and design elements within
Altium Designer. The system includes a complete
scripting development and debugging environment
and extensive documentation and examples
for programmers.
In-built scripting support greatly enhances the
flexibility of the Altium Designer system and allows
you to enhance and extend the capabilities of the
system and integrate Altium Designer into your
corporate business systems.
A further layer of flexibility is available in the form
of a complete Software Development Kit (SDK) for
Altium Designer. The SDK provides full documentation
and code templates to allow you to develop add-on
applications for Altium Designer using an external
Windows® software development system.
The flexibility and extensibility provided by the
scripting system and SDK makes it easy to deploy
Altium Designer within your company framework,
and puts in your hands powerful tools to customize
the system to suit your specific needs.
64
8 – Deploying Altium Designer with confidence
Get ready for the future – deploy Altium Designer today
The development of electronic products is a juggling
act that balances the drive to embed more and more
intelligence into a design with the time needed to
create, implement and test the application. The history
of electronics charts a continuous movement towards
designing at higher levels of abstraction in order to
efficiently contend with increasing levels of complexity.
This in turn forces the convergence of design
disciplines as various parts of a complete electronic
system become more dependent on each other.
Altium Designer takes a unified approach to
electronic product development to allow you to
efficiently manage the entire design process. It brings
integration to traditionally disparate design disciplines
and provides a single, unified environment that
transcends traditional design tool boundaries.
With Altium Designer you have the power to
bring together all of the processes that go into
designing the electronics of a product and harness
the potential of the latest technologies and
emerging design paradigms.
Unify the entire design process with Altium Designer.
65
Get licensed to design
Whether you work on your own, as part of a
small design team, or within a large corporation,
Altium Designer provides a flexible set of licensing
options that allow you to put the right capabilities
on every desktop. Wherever your designers fit into
the electronic product development process,
Altium Designer makes it easy to implement an
integrated design solution that increases productivity
and decreases overall design time.
Altium Designer's licensing options cover front-end
engineering, board-level system design and the
integrated development of embedded product
intelligence using programmable logic devices and
processor platforms. This allows you to effectively
deploy Altium Designer throughout your
organization, regardless of the size and mix of
functions within your design teams.
The free Altium Designer Viewer Edition license adds
to deployment flexibility by allowing you to equip
team members not directly involved in design with
full design document viewing capabilities.
Unify your entire design team with Altium Designer.
Make the most of
programmable devices
Historically, microprocessors and digital design
paradigms allowed portions of the design problem to
be moved into a highly fluid and easily updateable
realm – software. This enabled some complexity to
be dealt with in a 'soft' environment that was flexible
and easily changeable throughout the design process.
Today the availability of high-capacity, high-
performance programmable devices such as FPGAs at
relatively low cost is shifting the balance again and
allowing previously fixed design elements such as the
processor and its peripheral components and logic
blocks to be moved into a soft domain.
Our customers
“ In the 11 years I have been
using Altium’s software it just
keeps getting better and
more intuitive with every
release, which makes my
design job easier and
quicker. I’ve had the
opportunity to change
programs, but in my opinion
as a seasoned designer,
Altium Designer is the best
product in the price range.
The Altium team is also one
of the most dedicated I’ve
encountered, and a pleasure
to deal with. Using Altium
Designer instills confidence in
me that my designs produce
exactly what I expect.
“ not see the system in action for yourself? Visit the
Craig Wiper,
Sr. Electronics PCB Designer
General Dynamics-OTS, USA
In this increasingly soft future you need to ensure
that your engineers and design systems are capable
and ready to take advantage of the benefits that new
technologies such as FPGAs have to offer.
Altium Designer completely supports system-level
design using FPGAs and processors. What's more,
Altium Designer integrates the design of
programmable elements with the implementation of
these components at the physical level. This allows
you to harness the full potential offered by working
within a programmable environment, and lets you
take a completely new approach to system
development – one that facilitates the development
of more 'intelligent' products in a much shorter time
frame than has previously been possible.
With Altium Designer's unique LiveDesign capabilities
you can reach inside the programmable elements of
your design during development and interactively
debug both hardware and software. You can interact
'live' with signals inside an FPGA, as well as monitoring
the pin status of the devices in real-time. And you
can perform full source-level debugging on processors
running inside or connected to FPGA devices.
Altium Designer is the only system that fully-
integrates physical and programmable design,
allowing complete electronic product development
within a single, unified application environment.
Unify the programmable and physical elements of
your design with Altium Designer.
Seeing is believing!
Now that you have read about
the enormous benefits
Altium Designer can bring to your design team, why
DEMOcenter on the Altium website at
www.altium.com/Evaluate/DEMOcenter to view
on-demand video demonstrations that showcase
Altium Designer in action.
After all, seeing is believing!
66
8 – Deploying Altium Designer with confidence
Future-proof your company
At Altium, we believe that the future should be
available to every engineer, designer and developer,
and this belief has driven us to create a unique and
unified system for electronic product development
with the future built in.
Altium Designer unifies the development of electronic
products, from physical design and manufacture
through to the development of the programmable
elements integrated into the design. It allows you to
take a complete design from concept to completion
within a single, integrated design environment,
allowing design efficiencies not possible with
traditional design tools.
The electronics industry is a dynamic and rapidly-
changing playing field. New technologies are
continually developed that bring potential benefits to
67
the development of electronic products. You need
to be ready to take advantage of these benefits in
order to stay successful, and design products that
continue to the meet the evolving demands of
your customers.
Our mission is to make sure that you are completely
equipped and able to keep ahead of emerging design
technologies and trends. That's why we continually
develop and update Altium Designer. We put new
features, capabilities and technologies into your hands
as soon as they are developed. With Altium Designer
you can rest assured that your designers will have at
their fingertips everything necessary to work at the
forefront of electronics design technology.
As electronics technology moves into the future, make
sure you are ready to capitalize on the benefits.
Get ready for the future –
deploy Altium Designer today!
At Altium we have
taken a unified approach
to electronic product
development to provide
a system that allows you
to meet the future head
on. Altium Designer
incorporates all of the
capabilities needed
for both today's and
tomorrow's electronic
product development
challenges.
 Altium offices worldwide
North America Japan
Altium Inc Altium Japan K.K.
17140 Bernardo Center Drive Resona Gotanda building 7F
Suite 100 1-23-9, Nishi-Gotanda,
San Diego, CA 92128 Shinagawa-ku Tokyo 141-0031
Ph: +1 858 485 4600 Ph: +81 3 5436 2501
Fax: +1 858 485 4610 Fax: +81 3 5436 2505
Email: info.na@altium.com Email: info.jp@altium.com

Germany China
Altium Europe GmbH Altium Information Technology
Technologiepark Karlsruhe Shanghai Co., Ltd.
Albert-Nestler-Straße 7 Unit 13B, Hua Du Mansion
76131 Karlsruhe, Germany No 838 Zhang Yang Road
Ph: +49 (0) 721 8244 300 Pudong, Shanghai 200122
Fax: +49 (0) 721 8244 320 Ph: +86 21 6876 4016
Email: info.de@altium.com Fax: +86 21 6876 4015
Email: info.cn@altium.com
Switzerland
Protel AG Australia
(A subsidiary of Altium Limited) Altium Limited
Unterdorfstrasse 1 Level 3, 12a Rodborough Road
CH-4334 Sisseln Frenchs Forest NSW 2086
Ph: +41 (0) 62 866 41 11 Ph: +61 2 9975 7710
Fax: +41 (0) 62 866 41 10 Fax: +61 2 9975 7720
Email: info.ch@altium.com Email: info.au@altium.com

France
Protel AG
(A subsidiary of Altium Limited)
121 rue d'Aguesseau
F-92100 Boulogne-Billancourt
France
Ph: 0800 88 05 06
Fax: 0800 82 85 92
2190 AD BRACPGE-2W

Email: info.fr@altium.com

For a full list of Altium resellers visit www.altium.com

www.altium.com