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Read the latest news and information for pcb design enineers.

PCB Design Tools at Maker Faire Open Source Hardware Summit In response to a grassroots swell of “makers”, Maker Media launched the first Maker Faire in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2006. By 2014 over 215,000 attendees flocked to their two flagship events in New York city and San Francisco. Over the years, these large events spawned Featured Maker Faires, Mini-Maker Faires and School Maker Faires all around the world. If you’ve not heard of or been to a Maker Faire, I think their website describes it Read Article

New Altium Documentation So just how do you avoid creating a content dinosaur? Every so often, you stand back and ask, “is this working?”. Well, we’ve done that, and the answer was no. The content was simply too old, had too much missing, there were too many mistakes, it was too hard to find anything, and would take too much work to fix! It was old content that had started life being paper/pdf-based, which had not traveled well as it first moved to a wiki, then on to a Read Article

AltiumLive 2017: ANNUAL PCB DESIGN SUMMIT Rarely does a PCB design conference come along that is focused wholly on training content designed to make YOU a more knowledgeable and effective designer. That’s why Altium decided to create one--fully centered on designers...and presented by expert PCB designers. This Fall, AltiumLive 2017: Annual PCB Design Summit is coming to North America and Europe. We will host a 2-day PCB design conference like no other. You will hear from industry Read Article

PCB 2020: Altium Brings International Roadshow to a Close We have officially wrapped our two-month international roadshow, PCB 2020: Altium’s Roadmap to the Future, which gave attendees a glimpse into the future of electronics design. With nine cities on the roster, the event featured live presentations and hands-on demonstrations from the industry’s leading experts discussing the latest trends and technologies that are shaping the course of the electronics design industry. With the support of technical Read Article

Altium Designer 17.1: The Latest Version of Intuitive Design Technology is Here Altium Designer^® 17.1 was tailored specifically for today’s engineer. We understand that industry pressures to build more advanced, more efficient products can oftentimes mean a lag in the technology required to accommodate these demands. Our focus was to address these present-day challenges and fully equip designers with the necessary tools for optimum design. The pressure is on for you! You have to get to market in less time with more features Read Article

The Fantastic Four Make an Appearance at the IPC Designer Council Couldn't make it to your last IPC Council meeting? Read about some of the great insights presented during this month's meeting including a look into the future of analysis in Altium Designer^®. how's that? The Fantastic Four Make an Appearance at the IPC Council The Fantastic Four made a special appearance at the IPC Council - OC Chapter on Wednesday, March 2, 2016. Not the superheroes, of course, we’re talking about the four fantastic things that Read Article

Altium Designer 16 Is Now Available Altium Designer^® 16 is here! This release is available now as a free upgrade to all Altium Subscription customers and can be downloaded on the Altium Products Download page. Not an Altium Subscription customer? Contact our support team now to upgrade. This release is all about tapping into your true design potential and includes powerful new features to accelerate your PCB design workflow. From productivity-focused enhancements to intelligent Read Article

Announcements: Altium Designer 15.1 Released We are excited to announce the release of Altium Designer^®15.1, which includes new features and enhancements focused on productivity, documentation, and high-speed design. What’s New for High-Speed Design Altium 15 was all about improving the high-speed design process, and we’re taking that a step further in 15.1. Creating length matching rules is easier than ever with the new xSignals^® Wizard, which will automatically configure your length Read Article

New Productivity Features to Take Advantage of in Altium Designer 15.1 Since the first release of Altium Designer^® back in 1985 with Protel^®, our focus has always been on improving your design productivity. Getting those designs from concept to completion as quickly and easily as possible is always a concern of yours, and a focus of ours in each new version of Altium . At the core of Altium 15.1 is a set of new features that we’ve been hard at work on. Without further ado, we’d like to present the new productivity Read Article

Announcements: Altium Designer 15.0 Altium’s Development Team is pleased to announce new major release of Altium Designer^® 15.0. What’s New? xSignals^® - For High Speed PCB Design and Length Tuning We are happy to present one of the key features of this release - . This feature specifically targets precise length measurements between two pins, including cases with intermediate components, and T-junctions. New Output File Formats and IDX This release also brings three new formats for Read Article

Migrating from Altium Vault Server 1.2 to Altium Vault 2.0 Yesterday we released Altium Vault^® 2.0. As Nikolay mentioned, organizations using the Altium Server with Subscription are eligible to upgrade to Altium 2.0. After you’ve contacted your Sales & Support Center, the next thing you’ll wonder about is just how do you go about migrating your data to the new Altium 2.0. It’s pretty easy actually; I did it for myself in about an hour yesterday afternoon and documented the process, which I’d like to Read Article

Putting managed content to the test The release of Altium Live along with the Shanghai and Hobart managed content services marks a significant shift in the way electronic product development should be done. The concept of managed content services using cloud publishing is new to our industry - I mean, it has been sort-of tried before by others but never successfully executed. I believe we now have the right solution. At this time, as more and more users connect to AltiumLive and Read Article

How to download and install AD10 when using proxy servers The latest version of Altium Designer^® 10 can be installed directly from the Software section of AltiumLive. However, your computer’s network settings, particularly the use of proxy servers, can sometimes cause problems with the install process. Here’s how to find out if you’re likely to have proxy server issues and how to work around them. The latest version of Altium 10 can be installed directly from the Software section of AltiumLive. However Read Article

A Cloudy Focus There’s been some discussion on our new Forum about our plans for “all this cloudy stuff”. Some of you have asked why we have this focus. Some have questioned why we’re bothering when we can’t “even fix the so-and-so bug in the so-and-so editor in Altium Designer^® ”. I think our response to this is to remind everyone that this is not about the software, but about what you do with it. It’s not about AltiumLive, but how you exploit AltiumLive Read Article

Improving support for users - and investing in support AEs Many of you who’ve contacted Altium’s North American support team over the past two years may have noticed some changes. Notably, there were times when it was hard to get a live body on the other end of the phone, although generally once you did the advice you got was solid. For those users who resorted to emailing the team or logging a case through the support center (feel free to continue this practice), the wait time for a response could get Read Article

What's in a Name - Component Development Part 2 In this blog I outline how Altium Designers Content Team names printed circuit board (PCB) components, symbols and footprints. This seems like an eminently boring place to start, but something I’ve noticed is that figuring out a way to name circuit board components in engineering land often makes for animated discussion. Parametric information about the component is elevated to the row in the cmplib. This gives us the freedom to name the Read Article

Creative use of flexible tools A question came up on the forums today asking how to make a design rule in Altium Designer^® to check for silkscreen clearance to the board outline. Knowing that there is no direct method to achieve this, I had to get creative. A question came up on the forums today asking how to make a design rule in Altium to check for silkscreen clearance to the board outline. Knowing that there is no direct method to achieve this, I had to take step back and Read Article