San Diego, CA. Altium LLC has announced the next installment of its flagship PCB Design Software, Altium Designer 18. This version upgrade focuses on enhancing the user experience with key feature updates and productivity-focused enhancements available in one modern, easy-to-use design ecosystem. Altium pointed out that the rapidly expanding global PCB market has spurred remarkable advancements in the world of electronic design, with new products that are more sophisticated, more compact, and more complex than ever before. Altium continues its focus on developing cutting-edge design tools that meet the needs of today’s engineer. By leveraging feedback from the user community and with significant efforts in research and development, Altium Designer 18 delivers key updates and performance enhancements, along with new and improved features that significantly increase design productivity.

Altium Designer 18 continues its focus on delivering solutions that help designers increase their productivity, with modern tools that are easy to learn, easy to use, and easy to implement. This release simplifies the overall design experience with a modernized user interface that improves user commonality across all design domains, making it more intuitive and accessible. In addition to the modern user interface, this version features the much-anticipated upgrade to 64-bit architecture combined with multithreaded task optimizations, enabling users to design and release large, complex boards at unprecedented speeds. This upgrade fully equips engineers to tackle even the most complex PCB designs, with key performance optimizations and increased user control through every stage of the design process.

Altium LLC has announced the next installment of its flagship PCB Design Software, Altium Designer 18. This version upgrade focuses on enhancing the user experience with key feature updates and productivity-focused enhancements available in one modern, easy-to-use design ecosystem.
Design changes are applied through Altium Designer's standard ECO system, updating both the schematic and the PCB if required. Designers who use general parts and then assign the footprints later often have lots of problems and the process of checking becomes much more difficult, so it is a really good idea to have procedures in place to.

With Altium 365, Altium technology is available worldwide, giving designers the ability to work together from anywhere, including sharing PCB designs with anyone right in a web browser. Seamless integration across multiple platforms creates a streamlined design environment—the first of its kind in the industry.

“The landscape of electronic design and technology is shifting, prompting the need for smarter, faster, more efficient engineering solutions that are flexible and easy to learn,” said Ted Pawela, chief marketing officer at Altium. “Altium Designer 18 was developed specifically with the user in mind, leveraging their feedback to create a PCB design tool that helps address the challenges they face every day.”

Altium Designer 18 not only features structural improvements, but also includes major updates to ActiveRoute, a user-guided routing engine that now supports length tuning and pin-swapping, enabling users to quickly produce high-quality routes. The ACTIVEBOM editor also features several enhancements including a new BoM rule checker that allows designers to easily verify each BoM line item. Users can also design and release large, complex boards faster than ever before using the new multiboard assembly capability and real-time connection management. Each update in this release reinforces a unified, interconnected design environment, giving users a synchronized platform that enhances both individual productivity and team collaboration.

Altium Pcb Design Software

“Altium Designer 18 is the most powerful and intuitive mainstream PCB design solution we’ve ever launched,” said Sergey Kostinsky, vice president of engineering at Altium. “What makes this release unique is we’ve substantially improved the underlying technology infrastructure and at the same time delivered a host of new features and enhancements, giving users the tools they need to increase design productivity.”

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Whether you are making changes or deletions one thing is for certain, you are going to be selecting a lot of design objects in your design as you work on it. Altium Designer has introduced the select filter that will make the task of selecting objects much easier than before. This enables you to configure your design session so that you can select specific object types to work on.

When you have an area in your schematic or PCB layout that is very congested, it can be difficult to select the specific objects that you want. In the past, you may have had to zoom in tight or tried other tricks. Now you can set your filter for the object type that you want to select and you will have much more precision in your selection efforts.

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This article will be a good introduction to selecting design objects in general in Altium Designer. Not only will you learn about the select filter, but we’ll cover some of the basics of the different select functions as well. Equip yourself with an understanding of the tools you need to navigate the layouts and interfaces that you are working with.

The Basics: Selecting Objects in Altium Designer

To select design objects with Altium Designer, you can either click the left mouse button while hovering over the object or holding the left mouse button down and drag a selection rectangle over the object.

The two versions of drag-select in Altium Designer; Select Within & Select Touching

The drag select function is quite similar in that you can either select only those objects that fall within the boundaries of the drawn rectangle or you can select anything that the drawn rectangle touches. You can see the difference in the two images above where the “Select Within” rectangle is drawn from left to right, and shows as a blue color, while the “Select Touching” rectangle is drawn from right to left showing as green.

This is a basic function in Altium Designer, but for those who have migrated from other CAD systems that didn’t have this feature, it is important to understand. New users may find themselves drawing rectangle after rectangle and yet are unable to select the similar objects that they are expecting to.

As an example, in the image below you can see that even though the select within rectangle drawn from left to right does completely encapsulate the VCC symbol and its connecting wire, it only partially covers that transistor.

Here you see an example of the “Select Within” selection rectangle in Altium Designer

Because the select within rectangle only partially covered the transistor, it did not get selected as you can see on the right side of the image above. The select within rectangle is a great tool to use in situations where you need to specifically select certain objects. To select all design objects as in this example though, drag your rectangle from right to left to form the select touching rectangle instead.

Here you see an example of the “Select Touching” selection rectangle in Altium Designer

In the image above we used the select touching rectangle. As you can see the rectangle is touching the VCC symbol, the transistor, and the connecting wire. The select touching rectangle did its job though, and on the right side, you can see that all of the similar objects are selected and ready to be edited.

Often similar objects such as the transistor shown below have child objects associated with them. The transistor component is the parent object, while the displayed text is the child object. Using the select within rectangle we’ve encapsulated the text but not the component.

The transistor in this picture is only partially selected

As you can see the editing handles of the parent object, which is the transistor, are highlighted in white instead of colo