### Altium™ Designer 15.1

20 Nov 17

If you’re getting into circuit design, then these are some of the skills you want to have: Selecting parts, schematizing a working design, thermal management, EMC, managing various constraints, design for manufacture, etc.. If you can place and route a PCB in one design package, chances are it’s not going to be a huge amount of trouble to do it in another package. In this article, I would like to share my views on the most popular industrial EDA software, Altium **™** Designer.

Altium has bit of a learning curve for a newbie, so it might not be as intuitive as KiCAD **™** or Diptrace **™**, but is much better compared to Eagle **™**. However, for someone with experience in creating few PCBs with some other EDA softwares, Altium would be under the belt once you review the basic working and get used to the really impressive User Interface.

Altium’s biggest plus is its UI. Altium has different panels for the schematic library, PCB library, schematic document, PCB layout document, and others which can be easily accessed when working and hidden in tabs on the sides of the window when not.  These tabs can be viewed and accessed just as easily as changing tabs in a browser. This layout provides an ergonomic experience, making it so that users don’t have to keep on switching between windows during designing like they have to other design packages like KiCAD. Altium Designer has a project tab with an intuitive project tree of all the documents in a particular project, which allows easy access to drag and drop files in and out of the project.

The Altium Schematic editor is fairly straightforward and has tons of hotkeys associated with it to make it easy when creating a component with several pins. Most ICs just have a rectangle and pins but if you needed to draw custom shapes, it’s fairly easy to do so. The footprint editor is fairly straightforward as well: It comes with a wizard that walks the user through several different types of packages and does all the spacing for you. The integrated library basically combines the schematic library with the PCB library; Looking through it, we can find the necessary resistors and capacitors needed to build the circuit. They all have the associated PCB footprints built in.

Altium has the ability to outline all the changes in front of the designer, validate them and then execute. It does this with an “ECO” process and it literally lists every single change you’re about to make to the design and displays whether it was successful or not. This may seem like overkill but when you’re moving around the design making changes, it’s a really nice visual check to make sure you’re changing what you want. While creating the PCB and when importing the schematics we get to see every single thing through the ECO process, including the components, NETs, PCB footprints, classes and even the room. Altium has some features to help with routing complex designs.

The 3D modelling in Altium is fantastic. We can bring in models (such as our proposed enclosure) and see how well our PCB fits. We can export the entire board with components and use it to build a case in another software. Or we can import a case into Altium and design the board to fit it. It even does collision detection of the board, case, and components.

Altium has never been cheap, but it now has a product called Circuit Maker which is free, allows unlimited number of components and board size, and has a lot of Altium’s main functionalities. The drawbacks are that it’s in beta and you can only run it on your browser. Altium also has a mid range product called Circuit Studio that is very much like Altium Designer but a bit cheaper. It’s closer to the full designer than circuit maker is. Altium is quickly becoming the industry standard for professionals and the features that are lacking will surely improve as their customer-base and widespread feedback grow accordingly.

By: Tony Jose

References:

1. [http://www.altium.com/altium-designer/overview](http://www.altium.com/altium-designer/overview)

2. [https://www.sfcircuits.com/pcb-school/pcb-design-software-comparison-guideac](https://www.sfcircuits.com/pcb-school/pcb-design-software-comparison-guide)