Altium

For those who have recently, or thinking about downloading Altium 365, we are excited to get you up and running! We strongly recommend all customers attend one of our onboarding sessions. The Altium Product team will help you get started. Reserve your spot now!

There are many aspects to designing a PCB. One of the larger aspects has to do with managing your components. We all need components for our designs, but are those components in our library and designs up-to-date or even purchasable? These questions need to be answered before we can safely use them. If not, we could just be wasting our time designing with invalid components. Altium Designer has several tools to help you manage the components in your libraries and designs. You can determine if the components you’re using in your designs are safe to send off to production.

Component creation is a necessary evil when it comes to design, and it’s something we all need to do. But instead of spending hours creating your components and having them turn into a complete roadblock, let it be just a simple bump on the road. Altium Designer has several tools available to you in order to create the different aspects of a component, including the symbol, footprint, 3D model parametric data, supply chain information, and more.

Join us for a live webinar to hear about the top IoT industry challenges encountered by MistyWest, a Vancouver-based engineering design consulting firm with clientele spanning from Amazon, Google, and Intel to start ups - developing everything from wearable sleep monitoring devices to polar bear trackers. As devices are becoming increasingly smaller and complex, the need for ECAD and MCAD collaboration, rigid flex capabilities, and tight integration with cross-discipline teams are more important than ever. Join us as we dive deep into two of MistyWest’s recent IoT projects, and discuss top problems as well as solutions.

Design rules are there to help you design your board, but what’s there to help you design your rules? Without proper creation, design rules are useless. This makes board creation and accurate verification almost impossible. The upgraded design rule editor in Altium Designer allows you to validate your rules, checking for conflicts and usability issues. After you have a valid rule set you can begin to design and debug your board; which Altium Designer can assist you with as well.

Working between the Electronic and Mechanical design domains brings unique challenges. ECAD and MCAD tools have different design objectives and have evolved down different paths, and so has the way they store and manage their design and project data. Today's designs of small and complex product enclosures that house multiple, irregular-shaped printed circuit boards (PCB), demand that this challenge be solved . To successfully design these products, the designers must fluidly pass design changes back and forth between the ECAD and MCAD domains beyond outdated file exchanges.

Surprises can be fun. Supply chain surprises on the other hand are no fun at all; they can derail your budget, deadlines, and build quality. When electronic components become obsolete, design and production can suffer lengthy delays. With an average of 15 end-of-life notices issued every day, part obsolescence is a challenge that most engineers routinely face.

Whether you’re solo or a whole team, components need to have more than just a schematic symbol and footprint. Incomplete components can lead to chaotic libraries that are difficult to filter through and find needed components. This usually leads to duplicated efforts as well. Avoid these struggles and create complete, ready-to-use components with Altium Designer and Altium 365.

Designing is stressful enough, you shouldn’t have to worry about procuring parts as well. Unfortunately, this is the reality for most of us, especially in today’s climate. Supplies and prices seem to change overnight, and with counterfeit components being so prevalent it sometimes seems that the most difficult part of a project is being able to obtain trusted supply chain sources for your components. You need to ask yourself. Can you trust your supplier? Are they using counterfeit parts? Is there enough supply? Are you within budget? These are all important questions to answer, as any delays can cost you a first-mover advantage, and using bad parts can completely wipe out your budget. Fortunately Altium Designer has teamed up with industry leader IHS Markit to give designers powerful insight into their supply chain.

For those who have recently, or thinking about downloading Altium 365, we are excited to get you up and running! We strongly recommend all customers attend one of our onboarding sessions. The Altium Product team will help you get started. Reserve your spot now!