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The Summer 08 release of Altium Designer brings significant new and enhanced features to unify the design process, make project management easier, expand access to FPGAs and improve design productivity helping you create a return on your innovation and create the next generation of electronic products. Design Insight, for example, makes project navigation through complicated design projects faster, easier and more intuitive. Automatic previews and contextsensitive navigation allows you to preview documents and trace nets without having to physically open multiple schematic, PCB, or text documents a real convenience and timesaver! More flexible generation of output files and documentation allows better data management and design collaboration for your projects with Multiple Output Publishing. Physical platform design has been upgraded to better support increased board densities and high-speed signaling common in electronics designs. Interactive Routing features incredibly powerful and new capabilities such as Push and Shove, Walkaround, Hugging and Auto-Complete, giving you more control over the routing process. Intelligent automatic completion lets you rapidly finish off complex multi-trace routing tasks. Internal plane views have been significantly improved for a more accurate representation and reduced potential for downstream manufacturing errors as well. Having the ability to visualize a board in 3D gives a highly realistic, real-time view of the bare or assembled board and the best part is that its not a static model. Fully navigable and rendered on-the-fly, you can now make changes to the design and instantly see the result. PCB 3D Visualization has been further enhanced with more Display options that allow for easier configuration of multiple views, system level settings and improved support for 3D highlighting. Support for direct linking to external STEP models enabling electronics designers to interactively adjust board layout, component placement and even component package choice to suit the proposed enclosure design is also possible before the board is sent for prototype or manufacture! All ground breaking technology within the industry that reduces design iterations necessary to close the ECAD-MCAD loop and help you focus on true innovation and not just saving time-to-market. Programmable device support makes it easier for customers to develop their own Wishbone peripherals without having any knowledge of the internals of the Wishbone bus. Virtual instrumentation rises to a whole new level of control with Custom Instrument, a fully customizable instrument that allows you to monitor and control signals within your FPGA design. These are just a few of the new features in what we believe to be an exciting new major release of Altium Designer. Based directly on feedback from you, the engineers and designers developing designs, Altium Designer Summer 08 release helps you keep pace with the speed of todays development. Were excited about the new features and technologies were developing for this release and the reaction they are receiving, and were sure that youll be excited too!
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Document Insight
Project Insight
Figure 2. Hover over your project icon and selected document in the Projects panel or Document Bar to see your document preview.
Figure 1. Hover over your project icon in the Projects panel to see your project preview.
Document Insight provides you with a preview of your documents from both the Projects Panel and the Documents Bar. Clicking the Document Preview from either of these locations will make that document the active document. Document Insight is provided for schematic, PCB and text documents.
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Connectivity Insight
Connectivity Insight provides you with a list and preview of all documents in your project that are connected to the selected net object. Hover over or Alt +Double-click on a net object such as a port, sheet symbol, bus, power port, component or a harness to see Connectivity Insight in action.
this, its important to be able to easily move to Altium Designer from older style legacy point tools to stay competitive. Importing Allegro ASCII PCB (*.alg) designs can be directly translated into Altium Designer using the Import Wizard (File Import Wizard). Options for layer mapping and configuring a report log are also available. Files are converted to Altium Designer PCB document format (*.PCBDoc) and are added to a PCB project (*.PrjPcb). To translate your binary PCB designs (*.brd), you need to have Version 15.2 or 16 Allegro installed. Alternatively, you can use the Batch File included in your installation to translate your binary designs (*.brd) to ASCII format. In this way, you only need Allegro installed to convert all of your files to ASCII, which can then be directly translated in Altium Designer.
Figure 3. Click on one of the documents in the hierarchy tree to navigate to that document.
A list of documents is displayed with the current document highlighted and in preview mode, with the selected net highlighted. Hover over the other documents in the list to see the selected net highlighted. Your selected net will remain highlighted on alternate sheets for ease of navigation. Compiling your project is necessary for Design Insight to work.
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Programmable Devices
New Custom Wishbone Interface Component
In order to provide an easy, modular way to rapidly build FPGA-based system designs, Altium uses a non-proprietary Wishbone bus interface to connect together the various FPGA-based peripheral component blocks available for system construction. Previously designers have not been able to easily create or import their own custom peripheral components to connect to a Wishbone-based system. But now designers can easily extend the functionality that is supplied with Altium Designer and create or import custom functionality through the new Custom Wishbone Interface component (WB_INTERFACE). The Custom Wishbone Interface component enables you to build a custom Wishbone peripheral in a design, extending your 32-bit FPGA systems through the creation of custom FPGA logic and, what's more, you can build custom Wishbone peripherals without needing to know any details of the Wishbone bus. The end result is that this greatly increases the scope of applications that can be developed in Altium Designer and opens up the system for designers to build their own custom peripheral libraries, or to develop custom peripherals that can be used by others. The Custom Wishbone Interface component has a fully configurable interface for transferring data to/from connected logic, and a Wishbone bus to interface with a host processor. The individual units of this configurable interface are referred to as items. The interface can include a combination of one or more of the following items: Internal Registers allow values to be read from, and/or written to, connected logic. Command Sets allow operations to be enabled on connected logic. External Address Ranges allow access to blocks of addresses on connected logic.
Figure 5. Configure the Wishbone Interface to communicate with your custom logic as required and extend the capabilities of your design.
Customization is performed through configuration dialogs associated with the component, after placement on the OpenBus System or schematic document.
In addition to making the task of building custom Wishbone peripherals far easier, the Custom Wishbone Interface component provides the ability to generate C code based on the items specified in the interface simplifying interaction with the component from the embedded code running on the host processor.
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contains multiple functions, you will be able to choose which function you wish to export.
Figure 6. Use a C code symbol to interface to your C-coded custom FPGA logic.
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quickly whip up a useable panel. Use the various properties associated with a control to customize it further, even the title of the instrument.
Figure 8. Define the look, feel and operation of the instrument exactly how you want it.
Defined IO signals can be hooked up directly to the various controls in your custom GUI. However, for the passionate scripter configuration of the instrument is writing your own DelphiScript code to process IO as required. Scripts are fired whenever the instrument polls, and in relation to specified events.
Figure 7. Monitor and control signals in your design with your own, fully customized instrument.
Similar in look and feel to the existing DIGITAL_IO instrument, the interface is also quite intuitive. As part of the instrument's configuration you are able to create your own GUI this interface is seen once the design is programmed into the target device and the instrument is accessed. A palette of standard components and instrument controls enable you to
Figure 9. Use scripting to provide even greater control when processing signal IO.
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At the click of a button you can switch to editing your code within the more familiar scripting editor, complete with its syntax highlighting and coderelated display benefits. The configuration information itself is stored within a separate file (*.Instrument), allowing for portability of customized instruments between projects and installations why use someone else's instrument, when you can take your favorite with you? When an FPGA design is processed and a custom instrument is detected on the Soft Devices JTAG chain, Altium Designer needs to essentially retrieve this configuration information. There are two methods from which it does this, selectable by the user as part of the configuration: From the project the configuration information is retrieved from the corresponding .Instrument file for the instrument, which resides
alongside the project file. The project must be open in order to show the instrument from the Devices view. From the FPGA device the configuration information is downloaded with the design to the physical device, and stored in Block RAM. It is retrieved directly from here and the project need not be open.
The level of flexibility and customization enabled by the new custom instrument opens a new range of possibilities to designers working with soft device intelligence programmed into a target platform.
Figure 10. A new-look configuration dialog allows you to assign styles to signals as well as keeping the instrument armed indefinitely.
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Two default styles are provided: Clock and Default. The latter will be used for all signals unless you expressly assign a custom style during configuration of the LAX. These two styles, although editable in their graphical attributes, cannot be removed or renamed. Signal Highlighting right-click on a signal and use the new Highlight command to make the signal text bold and its corresponding waveform thicker. Bus Order Reversal - right-click on a group (bussed) signal and use the new Reverse Bus Order command to reverse the bit order accordingly. Optional Grid Lines both vertical and horizontal grid lines can now be toggled ON or OFF. Controls are available from the Wave General page of the Preferences dialog.
Figure 11. Cross-probe from errors and warnings in the Messages panel to corresponding entries in the Output panel.
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Figure 13. The new push obstacles routing can jump traces over obstacles as well as push vias and pads, automatically adjusting and maintaining traces connected to obstacles.
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Walkaround
Walkaround routing attempts to follow your cursor and find a routing path around existing obstacles. It also includes the ability to Hug existing objects such as traces. You can also use a combination of Walkaround and Push functionality that will trace around obstacles and Push fixed obstacles when needed. Guided routing makes short work of even the most complicated routing designs. A new powerful path-finding engine efficiently gets a trace from Point A to Point B by following your cursor path. You can still decide to continue on in the traditional fashion simply by clicking and continuing on as per previous behavior. If you change your mind on the current path, move the cursor back over the route and the trace automatically unwinds. Guided routing can be combined with AutoComplete for maximum routing efficiency.
Figure 14. Simply move your mouse along the path you want to take and the trace intelligently follows the movement of the cursor to create a perfect, rules-constrained route.
Hugging
Trace hugging can be configured to automatically follow the contour of adjacent objects while routing so you dont have to manually do it. Hugging assists with refining the routed path by smoothing corners as you are working. You can also swap to opposite route point, and switch leader trace to give you control over where to start or continue routing from. Just guide the cursor and youll have perfect parallel trace groupings every time, in no time.
Auto-Complete
Auto-Complete can save quite a bit of time and repetitive actions by completing traces and routing an entire connection automatically with a simple CTRL + Click at any time during routing. Especially helpful for finishing off complex multi-trace routing tasks, this intelligent feature is available in any routing mode provided that the router can find a suitable path and that a couple basic requirements. The start point and target path must be on the same layer and the route can only be completed in accordance with design rules.
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Figure 16. Here a 3D body is generated into a STEP model with transparent coloring.
There is also the ability to assign a 3D body object to an external STEP model. The models can be embedded so that is becomes part of the PCB document, or linked to it. Linked models will always remain up-to-date in Altium Designer even if the source files change. You can also import STEP models such as housings and enclosures to visualize complete assemblies in the 3D workspace.
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Visualization Control
New controls for visualization allow you to make changes such as opacity settings to 3D bodies through a panel rather than individually selecting them in the workspace. Presentations of modeled boards can be manipulated to ease navigation and visual checking of dense modeling. There are also added benefits of adding transparent enclosures to commercial product packaging. When viewing the PCB panel for an open PCB document, the panel now has an extra category 3D Models. When selected, the user can then select All Components and the window will display all models used along with a sub-listing of any model currently highlighted. When highlighting the model from a listing, the properties of this component model can be altered from the Highlighted models drop-down menu. The sub-panel will allow the individual elements to be altered in the same manner.
Interference/Clearance Checking
Real-time interference and clearance checking can be done as you work, giving you immediate feedback while placing 3D bodies. Conflicts between models or assemblies can be seen and resolved before your board leaves the virtual world, saving valuable time.
Figure 18. Determine physical constraints on your board layout based on feedback from the models clearance.
Figure 17. Separate and concise displays of multi-board assemblies at a glance are possible in the PCB panel.
Clearance checking between 3D bodies is incorporated into Altium Designers rules-based design checking system.
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Design to Manufacture
Improved Multiple Output Publishing
More flexible generation of different output files and documentation provides better data management and design collaboration for your projects with new Multiple Output Publishing. Designers can now consolidate multiple outputs into a single media type. For example, schematics, PCB, and BOM can all go into a single PDF output through the OutputJob editor. The OutputJob editor has been enhanced to include a new Output Media column. Output Media view allows different sets of outputs to be created and configured independently. This can include configuring a number of Print Jobs, PDF jobs and File Generation jobs. To create a new Output medium, copy and paste a set of compatible outputs into the Output Media column, then select the desired format. Alternatively, you can drag individual or multiple outputs into the Output Media column or select Add New Output Medium. Choose from either a Print Job (prints the outputs to your chosen printer) or a Publishing Job (creates a PDF). medium. This displays what will be included in the output whenever you publish your project. You can easily add additional output generators to existing Output Media by dragging or copying and pasting the output generator onto the existing Output Media Job.
You can also create an Output Media job for Output Generators that require file generation Netlists, Reports and Pick and Place files. As you select each output medium, green arrows link up the selected outputs to the output
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Revision History
Date 26-May-2008 Version No. 1.0 Revision AR0147 Whats New in Altium Designer Summer 08
Software, hardware, documentation and related materials: Copyright 2008 Altium Limited. All Rights Reserved. The material provided with this notice is subject to various forms of national and international intellectual property protection, including but not limited to copyright protection. You have been granted a non-exclusive license to use such material for the purposes stated in the end-user license agreement governing its use. In no event shall you reverse engineer, decompile, duplicate, distribute, create derivative works from or in any way exploit the material licensed to you except as expressly permitted by the governing agreement. Failure to abide by such restrictions may result in severe civil and criminal penalties, including but not limited to fines and imprisonment. Provided, however, that you are permitted to make one archival copy of said materials for back up purposes only, which archival copy may be accessed and used only in the event that the original copy of the materials is inoperable. Altium, Altium Designer, Board Insight, DXP, Innovation Station, LiveDesign, NanoBoard, NanoTalk, OpenBus, P-CAD, SimCode, Situs, TASKING, and Topological Autorouting and their respective logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of Altium Limited or its subsidiaries. All other registered or unregistered trademarks referenced herein are the property of their respective owners and no trademark rights to the same are claimed. v8.0 31/3/08
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