2 Building the physical platform PCB design

Integrate design capture, layout and verification 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.
Altium Designer unifies the process of board design by providing a single 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, constraintsdriven design environment. Altium Designer provides the unified environment you need to meet today's and tomorrow's physical design challenges.

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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 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. 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. 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.

Full constraints-driven design

Altium Designer's hierarchical rules system and query-based scoping allows you to rapidly and precisely define the physical constraints of your design.

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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. With Altium Designer you can capture your application with the confidence that your projects will be correct by design, and that the integrity of your source files is constantly maintained throughout the design process. >>

Our customers

Brian Sala Digital Device Development Group, Australia

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We have been using Protel for over 15 years and have observed Altium products grow in strength to their current high level of reliability and integration. Altium Designers interactive routing features streamline our design process, while polygon pours and split planes help us create neat and efficient board layouts.

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 its 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. 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.

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.

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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. 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 multichannel 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. 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. 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.

Handling repeated circuit blocks

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.

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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. 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. Altium Designer provides you with a complete interactive routing solution that combines rulesdriven, versatile interactive routing modes, predictive track placement and dynamically optimized connectivity to allow you to efficiently tackle any routing challenge. 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.

Intelligent interactive routing system

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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 to quickly and efficiently tackle any board routing challenge. Full adherence to design rules at every stage of the routing supports the constraintsdriven 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 unified with 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.

Our customers

Mattias Ericson, Engineer Omnisys Instruments, Sweden

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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.

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 fullyconstrain the physical layout of differential signal pairs on your board. 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.

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.

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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

Dan Bay, President Bay Enterprises, USA

Altium Designer is much easier to use than competing software, and I cant think of any other company that is anywhere 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.

Altium Designers signal integrity simulator allows you to compare proposed termination options and optimize signal quality.

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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,

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.

giving you the widest possible choice of component simulation options.

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!

Altium Designer unifies mixed-signal circuit simulation into the design capture environment, and provides a powerful waveform viewer that lets you fully analyze the generated simulation data.

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With Altium Designer you can take a design from concept to completion within a single, unified, constraints-driven design environment. Altium Designer provides the unified environment you need to meet today's and tomorrow's physical design challenges.