Altium Limited Altium Designer 6.8: Upgrade adds 3-D PCB visualization and navigation to designer kit

Adding 300 features and enhancements to the Altium Designer, Version 6.8 includes a 3-D PCB (printed-circuit-board)-visualization-engine capability, allowing designers to see how manufactured boards will look and improving information sharing with the design team. The visualization engine allows designers to rotate and flip of designs, navigate around components, zoom in on the bare board to the tracks and traces, and explore the surface of the board’s inner layers. The device engine functions in real time; the designer needs to provide no special 3-D models or setup. With hardware-accelerated 3-D graphics, the upgrade provides textured surfaces, realistic colors, lighting, and PCB-surface finishes. Moving the cursor around allows designers to examine the internal structure of the board. Additional features include unification of board-level design, programmable hardware, and embedded-software development in a single environment. The upgrade provides an early view of the finished board when manufactured, a natural view of the board during design, and the ability for users across the design chain to visualize the board-design process and layer stack. Other board-level additions include differential-pair support for an interactive track-length-tuning feature and the ability to simultaneously adjust the trace lengths of both differential pairs that most FPGAs include. The technology offers unified hardware-and-software compilation, extending the compiler, and producing a combination of compiled object-code and FPGA-targeted-output code from C-code input. Developers choose the C functions and variables for implementation in hardware before compilation, requiring no skill in HDL (hardware-design language). The Altium Designer 6.8 costs $12,000 for a full design kit.

Altium Ltd, www.altium.com