Altium Delivers New Altium Designer 14

Altium announced the new version of its flagship product, Altium Designer 14. The new release is focused on core PCB design technologies, and features support for flex and rigid-flex design, including schematic capture, 3D PCB layout, analysis and programmable design.

According to the company, the platform allows for smaller packaging of electronic designs, which in turn leads to lower cost of materials and production, and increased durability.

The new release includes the ability to handle the challenges of flex and rigid-flex designs, including advanced layer stack management. Support for embedded PCB components allows for more design miniaturization opportunities by placing standard components on an inner layer of the circuit board during fabrication.

Simplification of high speed design rules, including automated and guided adjustment of differential pair width-gap settings ensuring pair impedance is maintained. The capabilities of the PCB Editor’s via-stitching have been enhanced to include the ability to constrain the via-stitching pattern to a user defined area.

Altium has also introduced an importer for CadSoft Eagle so customers can use design files in other formats. The importer/exporter interfaces have been upgraded to support the latest versions of AutoCAD and a wider range of object types.

“Altium Designer 14 is a significant step forward compared to previous Altium Designer products delivering the functionality and features our customers need to fuel electronics innovation and performance,” said Frank Hoschar, Chief Marketing Officer at Altium. “We are listening to our customers. Based on feedback from our ‘Ideas’ forum, we have implemented many features and enhancements requested to provide engineers and designers with the most advanced, efficient electronics design solution available.”

For more information, visit Altium.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.