Embedded Systems Design Europe - June/July 2008 - (Page 8)

news Altium links electronic to mechanical design The new version of Altium’s uniﬁed electronics design solution introduces over 100 new features that unify still further the different design processes Electronics generally goes into some sort of casing or enclosure, but traditionally there has been minimal linking between electronics designers and mechanical designers. Getting the electronics to ﬁt into the case has traditionally been a matter of good luck, rather than good management. Altium have changed this by offering a real solution to the problem of matching electronics design (ECAD) to the mechanical design (MCAD) processes of enclosure design. Electronics designers, for the ﬁrst time, can now link directly to the mechanical CAD world in a non-proprietary way and unify ECAD and MCAD. Altium Designer’s existing 3D board design capabilities have been enhanced to allow for direct linking to external STEP models, an intelligent 3D ﬁle format supported by all major MCAD software. DYNAMIC LINK This means that electronics designers can bring mechanical assemblies or designs done in MCAD software into Altium Designer. Features have been added to allow full interference / clearance checking between any objects in the design, such as components and the case that surrounds them. Updates to the source STEP models are detected by Altium Designer, providing a dynamic link between the electronic and mechanical domains. Altium Designer now reads and writes STEP ﬁles, so electronics designers can set up dynamic linking between the PCB and mechanical design packages (depending on the MCAD system being used). Electronics designers can interactively adjust board layout, component placement and even component package choice to suit the proposed enclosure design. They can ensure that the PCB complies with mechanical 8 clearance constraints – tested directly against the real enclosure design – before the board is sent for prototyping or manufacture. This can signiﬁcantly reduce the number of design iterations necessary to close the ECAD-MCAD loop and make electronic product design easier. Altium Designer has a number of features under the banner of ‘Board Insight’ for the PCB design environment. Altium now extends these Board Insight principles with the initial set of Design Insight features. A new Document Insight mode gives designers automatic previews of documents when they hover over entries in the Project Panel or Document Bar. Project Insight allows designers to preview all documents in a project by simply hovering over the project icon in the Projects Panel. They can then select any document from the preview to open or jump to. Connectivity Insight lets designers hover over any net in their schematic source ﬁles and get a pop-up preview of all documents in the project connected to that net, as well as a list of connection nodes. The designer can click on any connection to jump straight to it. Design Insight raises project and document navigation, and information display, to the platform level, allowing designers to make the most of Altium Designer’s uniﬁed environment. Features developed under Design Insight will work across multiple document types and across design editors to provide an environment-wide solution to the problem of managing increasing design complexity across multiple projects and design disciplines. Altium simpliﬁes the job of generating outputs with an Output Job editor. This provides a centralized interface from which to deﬁne all required outputs. The information is stored at the project level, ensuring designers can recreate any necessary output ﬁles at any time. Altium now makes generating dif- ferent types of output easier with the addition of Output Media options in the Output Job editor. This lets designers consolidate multiple outputs into a single media type. For example, a designer can put the schematics, composite PCB layout and bill of materials into a single PDF output. Internal planes are becoming much more common in all areas of designs. Their use is becoming more sophisticated and therefore designers need the capabilities to work with complex plane conﬁgurations. In Altium Designer, plane support has been signiﬁcantly upgraded and enhanced. LIVE CONNECTIVITY CHECKING Internal planes are now modeled and displayed in 2D and 3D with 100% accuracy in the PCB editor. Also, the DRC now includes live connectivity checking of planes and detects net breaks caused by inadvertent plane splits, isolated pads and vias, and starved thermal relief connections. The end result is that designers can create internal signal planes in their designs and work with the conﬁdence that what they see and verify in the PCB editor will translate into a correct set of manufacturing ﬁles. This eliminates discrepancies between design and manufacturing ﬁles and gives designers a much higher degree of visibility into the ﬁnal shape, connectivity and electrical integrity of their plane layers. Errors going to manufacture are reduced, and there are fewer prototype spins overall. Altium Designer now allows custom logic to be deﬁned using the C programming language. A new type of sheet symbol, a C Code Symbol, has been added to the system to allow blocks of C code to be added within the schematic design hierarchy. The C Code Symbol refers to underlying C source code in the same way that Verilog or VHDL code is incorporated into a design. The ports on the symbol represent the parameters referenced in the underlying source code. JUNE – JULY 2008 | embedded systems design europe | www.embedded.com/europe http://www.embedded.com/europe

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Embedded Systems Design Europe - June 2008 Contents Work in Progress to Define Compact PCI Plus Power.org Demonstrates New Tools Project Supports Multi-core System Programming Altium Links Electronic to Mechanical Design PLDs Look to Cut Power Budget and Costs Project to Provide Coverage Analysis Tool Microsoft Details Windows Embedded Update Cover Feature: Leveraging Virtual Hardware Platforms for Software Allocating Memory in MATLAB-to-C Code MDD & IDEs: Making the Twain Meet in Embedded System Designs Debugging Mixed Signal Designs for Infrequent & Random Events Why Open Source is the Natural Choice for High-security Systems Bringing the Benefits of Low Power CPUs to Modular Design New Products Advertising Contacts

Embedded Systems Design Europe - June/July 2008

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