Altium Designer
A printed circuit board (PCB) development and design software
Altium Designer lets PCB (printed circuit board) designers easily select electronic components from distributors, design their boards in a 3-D, interactive environment, simulate and debug the design, and publish the design, its specs, and component data to the cloud.
Features:
- Schematic capture
- 3-D PCB design
- Interactive 3-D board editing
- MCAD export to STEP
- Field-programmable gate array (FPGA) development
- Project release and data management
- Electronic component distributors database integration
- Cloud publishing of design
- Simulation and debugging (VHDL language)
Designing complex PCB boards for printing and manufacturing is a lot easier with Altium Designer. Altium gives you complete control over all four areas of a PCB project: schematic development, PCB design and development, Field-programmable gate array (FPGA) development and documentation, and management of PCB release and data information.
Altium simplifies all steps in the development process, from designing and capturing the simple, 2-D schematic diagrams that are the start of all projects, to the development and designing of the PCB board based on those schematics. But even the best-designed boards are useless to the end-user if they don’t have up-to-date specifications and instructions to program an FPGA (field-programmable gate arrays) components included on the board: with Altium, board users can easily access any information about the PCB from the cloud, which you can easily maintain and manage with the latest release date and specifications.
Altium Designer's integrated 3-D visualization allows you to check PCB component clearances so there are no surprises during manufacture.
Altium Designer is not the cheapest PCB design software (it may even be the most expensive), but it is lauded for its ability to make designing complex PCBs fast and as easy as possible. Altium is also the most popular PCB design package among large PCB design companies, and it’s the one most new freelance engineers are most familiar with.
Altium Designer integrates with several component distributors data bases making electronic component selection easy and up-to-date.
Intel Core i5/i7 processor or equivalent
Minimum 4GB RAM, 16GB or more recommended
10GB free hard disk space
PROS
Unified workspace enhances efficiency and productivity.
Offers excellent real-time error checking and verification.
CONS
Steep learning curve for beginners.
Occasional bugs and slow updates from developers.
Jake
Altium Designer is a great app for anyone who is interested in designing printed circuit board components. It makes the process of design simpler and more enjoyable.
Sat, Jan 13, 2024
The app comes with a set of tools for designing, prototyping and manufacturing PCBs. Use the app when you want to create complex multi-layer boards, manage components and design rules. It isn’t hard to export your designs projects to other CAD systems. Users like the technical support team as they often get help fast. Though, beginners might find the app a bit complicated. Still, it’s a powerful and feature-rich PCB design piece of software.
