Altium Designer 14 understøtter nu avanceret flex PCB-teknologi

The new Altium Designer 14 is now released, and it extends the company’s leadership position in native 3D PCB Design systems by delivering a new customer centric platform with heavy emphasis on core PCB design technologies.

Altium Designer now features support for flex and rigid-flex design, including schematic capture, 3D PCB layout, analysis and programmable design – all in a single, unified solution.

With its unique native 3D visual support of this technology, Altium Designer 14 opens the door for new innovations in electronic design by allowing for increased processing and communication within a smaller, more fluid space. The enhanced platform allows for smaller packaging of electronic designs, which in turn leads to lower cost of materials and production, and increased durability.

- I’ve been using Altium software for almost 30 years, and rigid-flex is one of the coolest new features that has come up, from my personal wish list, of the last three years, says Narinder Kumar,  PCB Design Engineer for Pelco (a division of Schneider Electric).

- Altium has continued to deliver breakthrough technology and features into their products to meet the demands of their customers. This rigid-flex design is a very cool feature. It’s been a long time coming, and I like it.

Key-features in Altium Designer 14 related to 3D implementation of advanced board design include:

●     Flex and Rigid Flex PCB design support – This release includes the ability to handle the challenges of flex and rigid-flex designs including advanced layer stack management.

●     Support for embedded PCB components – Allowing far greater design miniaturization opportunities by placing standard components on an inner layer of the circuit board during fabrication.

Key-features in Altium Designer 14 related to high speed PCB design include:

●       Simplification of high speed design rules, including automated and guided adjustment of differential pair width-gap settings ensuring pair impedance is maintained.

●     Via-stitching improvements: The capabilities of the PCB Editor’s via-stitching have been enhanced to include the ability to constrain the via-stitching pattern to a user defined area.

Key-features in Altium Designer 14, that improves interoperability with popular ECAD and MCAD formats include:

●     CadSoft Eagle Importer – With the understanding that not all design work is done in Altium Designer, Altium has introduced an importer for CadSoft Eagle so customers can use design files in other formats.

●     Autodesk AutoCAD Import / Export – up-to-date support for transfer of designs to and from AutoCAD  *.DWG and *.DXF formats. The importer/exporter interfaces have been upgraded to support the latest versions of AutoCAD and a wider range of object types.

●     Direct use of IBIS models for IC pins facilitate  signal integrity analysis with Altium Designer.

A full overview of Altium Designer 14 can be found here.