Altium Designer

Altium Designer (until 2005 marketed under the name Protel ) is an EDA program of the company Altium Limited for the development of printed circuit boards in the electronics.

History

The current company Altium Limited published in 1985 in Australia its first PCB layout program Protel PCB. In 1986 the export to the USA and Europe. In 1987, Protel Schematic came to the creation of schematics to do so. The software was released as the first ECAD software at all on Windows 1991. With Protel 98 the individual program components were integrated into a surface. Since 2005, the software is distributed under the name of Altium Designer. Version 6.8 offered in 2007 as the world's first ECAD solution a three-dimensional visualization of PCB. In April 2011, Altium moved its headquarters from Australia to Shanghai in China. As a result, most employees were laid off in Sydney.

P-CAD

In 2000, the company Accel Technologies of San Diego, California has been taken over with their program P-CAD Altium. P-CAD had a similar functionality as Protel, the idea was to combine the best of both tools. 2000 was the launch of P- CAD, 2006, it was discontinued in favor of Altium Designer. For the migration of P-CAD to Altium is an import wizard is available.

The import function works only unreliable in old PCAD data. When trying to import a PCB, Altium may crash or (eg copper surfaces ) to copy properties wrong, so the import function should be used with caution. In any case, the layout should be checked after the import again thoroughly manually. Schematics can be sometimes not open at all. When the import of PCAD data is essential, helps in controlling the imported data of the free PCAD Viewer.

Functions

One of the main objectives of Altium is to offer an integrated development solution for electronics development. An outstanding feature of the program is the 3D view of the PCB during the development designed to the import and export of 3D data.

Specifically, the software offers modules for the following tasks:

• Schematic capture
• PCB layout
• FPGA programming
• Embedded Software
• Circuit simulation
• CAM ( Computer Aided Manufacturing)

Dissemination

Altium is by well-known companies ( Bosch, Intel, Philips, Siemens and others) used and has received numerous awards in various countries.

Through intensive marketing software gained wide distribution. On the other hand, the binding of Microsoft Windows (eg through the use of Direct3D instead of OpenGL for visualization ) is criticized.