SYDNEY, Australia – Altium Ltd. announced the addition of new productivity-enhancing features for its Altium Designer unified electronics development system to assist engineers with handling high-speed design issues.
 
Altium Designer 6’s intelligent interactive routing system has been enhanced with the addition of a new interactive length-tuning tool specifically for high-speed designs. This new feature reportedly allows designers to quickly optimize and control net lengths by inserting “accordion” segments into a track. Tuning can be manual or rules-driven, and designers can select from several available amplitude styles. This feature is said to combine seamlessly with impedance-controlled, differential pair and multi-trace routing capabilities to give Altium Designer users a comprehensive interactive solution tuned for high-speed, high-density board design projects.
 
Enhanced control and display over PCB layers will reportedly have more efficient enhanced productivity when moving around large complex designs. The placement and editing of polygons has been streamlined to make the creation of large copper-filled areas fast and intuitive. Improvements have also been made to the way components and libraries are identified and used within the system to deliver greater levels of user control and flexibility. Creating and delivering output for designs that contain embedded board arrays has been improved with added intelligence for identifying layer stackup violations. In addition, enhanced output dialogs for Gerber and ODB++ now reportedly make it even easier for users to make decisions about whether to proceed with output or resolve compatibility violations.