- #Meaning of double line in altium designer pcb professional#
- #Meaning of double line in altium designer pcb zip#
It’s easy to buy that a secure cloud service is a safer bet than emailing zip files or uploads to another company’s ftp.Īltium’s vision for 365 goes beyond cloud-based sharing. Altium, however, has chosen to introduce these cloud services at a point where the design would be leaving the building anyway – at the point where the finished design is sent to manufacturing. Recently, though, those attitudes appear to have softened, due to the improved security of cloud services and the realization that in-house security at most companies can be considerably weaker than what’s available in the cloud. Typically, we hear that design teams don’t want to use any EDA system that puts their design data into the cloud – due to security concerns. The 3D view, in particular, can clear up common handoff errors such as manufacturing with components inserted on the wrong side of the board.Īltium has ventured into some historically dangerous territory with cloud-based EDA, but they’ve chosen a strategic insertion point that nullifies the usual objections. Using a web browser, you can see all the relevant views of the design, including schematic, layout, BOM, and 3D views of your board(s). There is no emailing design files or finding the right version of all the required files to put on ftp. With Altium 365, the complete design can be shared, examined, and annotated in real time, both by you and by the manufacturer. These typically go back and forth as email attachments or ftp uploads, and the process is rife with opportunities for error. Thus begins a tedious process of editing-without-breaking and working to maintain a cohesive set of design files that match up on both your side and the manufacturing side. Then (often after you’re in the middle of your next project or off on a well-earned vacation), you get a reply saying there are problems with the design – manufacturing rules specific to your fabricator that were violated, parts that are now unavailable or too expensive, and so forth. You complete your design and try to gather all the necessary files into a complete collection to send off to manufacturing. Yep, that includes tablets and phones.Īs any PCB engineer knows, the handoff to manufacturing can be a clunky affair. An engineer using Altium Designer 19 can share a PCB design via Altium 365, and others (such as manufacturing or mechanical design teams) can view and interact with that design via any web browser. Last week, Altium announced a major new release of their flagship Altium Designer PCB design suite, as well as a new cloud-based collaboration capability dubbed “Altium 365.” In short, Altium 365 is intended to facilitate collaboration on PCB designs – particularly between design and manufacturing, and between electronic and mechanical design domains. Altium has a more “grassroots” strategy, uniquely focused on winning over each individual designer.
Zuken has worked to translate their position of dominance in the Japanese market into a competitive presence in the rest of the world. Mentor and Cadence have historically followed a “major account” strategy – focusing on top-down adoption of their tools in large- and medium-sized system design companies.
#Meaning of double line in altium designer pcb professional#
Today, there are arguably four major suppliers of PCB tools for the professional engineer – Mentor, Cadence, Altium, and Zuken.
The past several years, the market for PCB design tools has been consolidating and expanding. The challenge for tool developers, then, is to make that disruption worth the cost – to balance that disruption against benefit – rewarding the engineer for the trauma of that change. The designer/tool relationship is partially broken and must be remolded. Thus, every time a “new” version of a tool comes out, there is a cost. Engineers develop intimate relationships with their design tools, and resolved and inspired design work tends to flow directly from a mature bond between between engineer and tool. And, just as there is no “right” or “best” set of tools and materials for creating a painting, there is no “best” PCB design solution. The engineer’s experience, expertise, intuition, and creativity give the soul to the final design.ĮDA tools are the paints and brushes of the PCB designer. When an engineer sits down with a schematic and begins transforming it into a physical realization of fiberglass, copper, solder and components, there are an impossible number of constraints and tradeoffs to balance, and a practically infinite number of solutions that could result. There are an infinite number of paintings that could result, and the experience, expertise, intuition, and creativity of the artist give life to the finished work of art. A painter beginning a painting has only a concept, and the painter’s work is to transform that concept into a physical realization of canvas, oils, pigments, and brush strokes.
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