SAN DIEGO – Altium and MacroFab today announced Altimade, a “design with manufacturing” application, which is now available to the Altium user community.
Available on the Altium 365 cloud platform and connected directly to MacroFab’s digital manufacturing platform, Altimade enables customers to request an instant quote and place an order to produce their PCB assembly without leaving their design environment.
Altimade accelerates the prototype manufacturing process by connecting design, manufacturing, and supply chain data and professionals on the Altium 365 cloud platform.
“By integrating Altium’s cloud platform for PCB design with MacroFab’s modern digital-first manufacturing platform, Altimade represents a huge step toward the digital transformation of the electronics industry,” said Ted Pawela, chief ecosystem officer, Altium. “We’re no longer designing for manufacturing as a separate activity, but designing with manufacturing in a collaborative environment.”
In a briefing with PC&F earlier this week, Pawela said Altium is setting out to solve certain EMS challenges: data translations getting lost in translation; incompatible tools; multiple time zones; and supply chain shortages.
“Altium 365 is the first step in uniting the industry,” he said, solving problems by leveraging the cloud. “It provides the ability to collaborate. Altimade is an application built on top of Altium 365. It streamlines PCB manufacturing and unifies the user experience from design through prototyping.”
Customers place orders for prototypes directly from their design platform. Altimade connects end users to contract manufacturers. “It solves communication issues.” The “key thing,” Pawela said, is it’s “cloud-enabled.
“Altimade eliminates the need for file exports and translations.” Users “select and place components” and “see what it means to the cost of producing the board. After finishing the board, it provides a cost range based on the time [users] will wait to receive the board.”
This provides “a lot more visibility.” Users “can actually order the board with enhancements” and “collaborate with manufacturing.”
Pawela called it an “Uber-like customer experience.” An order is received and sourced; there’s a real-time feed from the manufacturing floor to designers’ desktops. “If you have a question, you can highlight comments on the board for all to see. Changes create a history. Now you know why they were made and when they made them, instead of throwing Gerber changes over a wall.” It creates a “continuous thread” from concept to receiving prototypes.
In May, Altium invested in Macrofab. The reason was to work hard with Macrofab to collaborate on a manufacturing platform with the Altium cloud platform to “make integration a reality,” Pawela said.
Macrofab cloud is connected to 75 manufacturers. Altium is the supply and design chain part. They chose to work with Macrofab because the two companies saw the same problem: “To bring design into the 21st century, you have to cloud-enable it.”
Key customer benefits include real-time supply chain data; avoiding design rework; everything is shared (no translation); and no dump of Gerber files. There is “no loss of translation,” Pawela said.
A beta program with 10 customers for Altimade went “really well. They were quite happy with the convenience.”
“Altium and MacroFab have modernized PCB design and manufacturing by bringing them to digital-first cloud platforms,” said Misha Govshteyn, CEO, MacroFab, in a press release. “Combining them truly redefines the PCB design to the manufacturing process and has the potential to accelerate product development and unlock enormous value for our customers.”
Using Altimade, Altium customers have access to continuously updated component and manufacturing prices and lead times and can place an order to produce their printed circuit boards directly within the design environment. All data required for manufacturing is shared via the secure, cloud-based Altium 365 platform, without file translations and exports. Orders are fulfilled by MacroFab’s network of manufacturers.
Altimade creates, maintains, and displays a continuous digital data trail for every step in the design, procurement, and manufacturing processes of a PCB. Any changes to the original bill of materials or design details automatically update the “golden record.”
Altimade helps customers achieve higher quality PCBs by maintaining a digital thread between the design intent and what is physically produced. In addition, Altimade helps engineers ensure manufacturability since the Altium Designer software runs design rule checking to ensure the design meets MacroFab’s manufacturing specifications.
The MacroFab digital platform is used by supply chain teams to build everything from PCB assemblies to fully tested and packaged electronics products. MacroFab aggregates unused capacity at 75+ factories in the US, Canada, and Mexico to give mid-market companies an alternative to offshoring, where capacity is increasingly constrained and lead times are impacted by supply chain and freight disruptions. MacroFab turns its network of factories, logistics centers, and warehouses used in manufacturing into a cloud resource, driven by software and connected to Altium 365 through modern APIs.
“For a long time, we’ve been thinking about a closer connection between the manufacturing floor and the designer. This is the first time we’ve made it real,” Pawela told PCD&F. “Every manufacturing plant is different.” They wanted to “make it so constraints specific to a manufacturer are visible to the designer in the early part of the design process based on what the manufacturer can do.”
Altium is confident “moving to a cloud platform was the right call.”
Altimade is now available to all Altium Designer 22 and Altium 365 users. Altium Designer currently has 55,000+ active seats. Altium 365 has 13,000+ active users.
Visit altium.com/altimade for more details.
Register now for "Best DFM Practices for Board Engineers," a new three-hour webinar from Susy Webb, CID. Coming Feb. 22. www.pcb2day.com
