Altium Issues New Release of Altium Designer for PCB Design

Altium announces the newest version of Altium Designer, software for printed circuit board (PCB) designers and engineers. 

Altium Designer provides a complete software environment for the design and realization of PCBs, the company says. The latest release, Altium Designer 20, offers major upgrades to the software’s unified design environment, user experience and PCB design capabilities. 

Designing as an individual, or working within a team, users are able to design boards without limits—from simple to complex; from single PCB to multi-board systems; from low frequency to high-speed; from logical design all the way to physical board and bill of materials. In this single tool, users can create schematics and PCB layouts, run circuit simulations, select electronics components and source them from various manufacturers, and document their designs for manufacturing.

“Altium Designer 20 is a game changer for PCB design,” says Sergey Kostinsky, CTO of Altium. “This release includes user-driven improvements and advanced capabilities that leapfrog the competition.”

Advancements in the latest release include:

• Interactive routing: new “push-and-shove’’ capabilities enable routing of complex high-density interconnect boards and speed-up design times by over 20%, even for simple printed circuit boards. 
• New high-speed PCB routing capabilities: new advanced routing enables users to efficiently design high density and high-speed boards that use DDR3/4/5, 100 GBit ethernet and SerDes PCIe 4.0/5.0.
• Multi-board design: the latest release leverages ActiveBOMTMcapabilities, including supplier search, BOM rule checking and live part choices, for multi-board assemblies. Users can also export 3D PDF files of the multi-board assembly allowing collaborators to view and manipulate 3D assemblies.
• New high-voltage design capabilities: for applications where high-voltage design is critical (e.g., spacecraft, high-altitude aircraft and high-tech lasers), AD20 provides new creepage rules that help maintain high-voltage clearances across the PCB surfaces for prevention of electrical arcing hazards for power supply and mixed-signal device designs. 
• Enhanced user experience: faster, dynamic compilation of data across schematic, layout, BOM generation, design documentation and other elements of Altium Designer’s unified design paradigm dramatically improve user productivity.
• User-driven quality improvements: AD20 has over 200 enhancements suggested by Altium Designer users. 

Altium Designer 20 will be available to customers in the fourth quarter of 2019.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.