Real-time, 3D PCB design from Altium

Altium’s real-time 3D PCB features have been extended with faster real-time 3D design performance. New capabilities help designers manage the release of their designs to manufacture. Altium is also introducing new concepts in Altium Designer to let designers explore future techniques and design possibilities, and help exploit the potential of programmable devices. A new Field Instrumentation dashboard will help designers overcome some of the challenges of testing or remotely monitoring designs inside FPGAs. And a new plug-and-play Software Platform Builder will help designers quickly 'snap' together systems and exploit a standard set of services within the 'soft' hardware environment created inside programmable devices.

Nick Martin, Altium's CEO, said, This is the second release under our new twice yearly approach and we are pretty excited about what we are delivering. With this new approach to product delivery, we are moving away from making huge changes every couple of years towards smaller updates made more often. But, as this release shows, this doesn’t mean we are holding back on taking significant new technologies to the market. The new Software Platform Builder and the Field Instrumentation dashboard included in the winter 09 release are examples of this. Both represent new frontiers for designing electronics systems and both should be viewed as platforms for moving the overall process of designing electronics forward.

We expect these to rapidly develop and expand over the next few releases in much the same way that our 3D PCB system has developed over the last couple of releases. And all of these are examples of what a next generation of electronics design system should look like.

“The current difficult economic outlook is encouraging everyone to take a step back and examine what makes them, and the products they create, unique. Our job is to facilitate this process by creating the tools that help electronics designers make this happen. The many enhancements in the new winter 09 release of Altium Designer will give a significant boost to designer effectiveness. But it’s the radical new systems, such as the Software Platform Builder and Field Instrumentation dashboard, that provide the foundations on which to lift the way electronics design is done in the future to new levels.”