Altium has launched the Winter 09 release of its next generation electronics design system Altium Designer. It has extened the real-time, dynamic 3D PCB design features.

Altium Designer now supports texture mapping of 3D models, which lets designers add realistic surface finishes to components and boards.

The memory and speed of the 3D PCB graphics system has been improved by up to seven times. Also faster is 2D drawing, by up three times; 2D transparency, over 11 times faster; highlighting and masking, over nine times faster; and 3D rotation, up to five times faster.

Included is a list of benchmark results for commonly available PC graphics cards, to help designers exploit the power of 3D PCB design,.

Added capabilities help designers manage the release of their designs to manufacture. It lets designers explore future techniques and design possibilities, and help exploit the potential of programmable devices.

A field instrumentation dashboard will help designers overcome some of the challenges of testing or remotely monitoring designs inside FPGAs. This helps overcome some of the challenges of testing or remotely monitoring designs inside programmable devices.

A plug-and-play Software Platform Builder will help designers quickly 'snap' together systems and exploit a standard set of services within the 'soft' hardware environment created inside programmable devices.

Vias have been enhanced by allowing different sized pads to be used on different signal layers for each via. This so-called via layer stack-up supports higher trace densities, and designers can offset holes in component pads.

The interactive routing engine has been enhanced. Routing of differential pair signals and of buses (routing multiple, related traces in one action) now use all the capabilities of the routing engine. These include automatic 'walk around' of existing objects, 'hugging' new traces to existing traces, pushing aside of existing objects (including vias) and intelligent automatic completion of traces.

Technology has been introduced to create and track document histories within the design environment. Altium Designer now centralises the definition and generation of output files to allow simpler processing of outputs. And documents can be created in a variety of formats, most notably as smart PDFs and in online formats.

A Design Release Manager provides a Wizard-style interface for managing the entire process of releasing a design to people beyond the design team. It provides a central control panel for creating all the various output files in the various formats.

More information: www.altium.com