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“Hands On” Review by Nicholas Vinen We’re often asked what software we use to create the projects – particularly the PCBs – in SILICON CHIP. The answer is the Australian package, Altium Designer – and we’ve used it for around ten years. They release new versions frequently and so, during that time, many features have been added. But the latest version, Altium Designer 18, is the most radical and best update so far. A ltium Designer version numbers correspond to the year of their release, so AD18 is the 2018 version, AD17 is the 2017 version and so on. We are currently using a mix of AD14 and AD17 (the use of AD14 comes mainly down to “inertia”, ie, we were too busy to upgrade and learn the new features!). AD18 can be installed alongside an earlier version so that you can still use the old version if necessary. Upon loading it for the first time, the differences were immediately apparent and the biggest change is that AD18 is a lot faster than AD14 or even AD17. Altium claim that overall it’s around five times faster than AD17 and for some operations, the improvement is even larger. And while some operations still take longer than I would prefer, overall it’s a major improvement and I am definitely more productive (and happier!) because I don’t have to wait as long for certain actions to complete. The speed-up is most noticeable on common tasks like zooming into and out of and panning around a PCB, placing and moving tracks and so on. The 3D view is also a lot faster and looks significantly better as the simulated light source reflects off components (see Fig.1); not just the surface of the PCB, as used to be the case in the old version. Another major change with AD18 is that they have abandoned the 32-bit version; it is 64-bit only. Since most recent desktop and laptop computers have 64-bit processors, this is not a problem however it won’t work if you are running a 32-bit version of Windows. In that case, you will need to stick with AD17. Seriously, you would be better off upgrading your machine. Along with changing to a 64-bit application, Altium have added support to take full advantage of multi-core processors. Since pretty much all desktop and laptop CPUs sold in 36 Silicon Chip the last decade or so have at least two cores and often four (or more), that will give significant performance benefits, especially when working on large designs. For example, it will speed up the Design Rule Check process, which can be quite time-consuming when you make large-scale changes to a design. User interface changes The user interface is noticeably different. While there have been subtle UI changes in previous versions, the changes in AD18 are probably the biggest since Protel 99 gave way to Altium Designer. While these changes are significant, they Fig.1: the 3D rendering in AD18 is much improved compared to previous versions and gives a more realistic result. It’s also much faster, allowing you to zoom and change the perspective very easily. In this screen grab, the BC547 has been selected and the orange cone shows where the mouse cursor is pointing. Note the simulated light reflecting off the top of IC1 and surrounding components. Australia’s electronics magazine siliconchip.com.au Fig.2: the normal 2D editing view of the same board shown in Fig.1. Q1 is still selected and you can see the new properties panel at the right-hand side, which allows you to easily view and change the properties of one or more components as soon as you click on them. It’s also used when setting up the initial properties for new objects that are placed on the PCB or in a schematic diagram. have taken some considerable effort to minimise the disruption on your work flow if you are already an experienced Altium user. I am certainly glad of that, given how much experience I have had using the software! For example, in previous versions of Altium Designer, when you were placing components, tracks, vias and so on, you could press the Tab key to bring up a properties dialog. This would let you make changes such as altering the width of the track you are placing, changing the routing method or changing the particulars of the component (its name, description etc). So when I started using AD18, I pressed Tab but was a bit confused by the fact that a dialog did not pop up as I had expected. But then I realised that the properties have now moved to a (more-or-less permanent) panel which by default appears on the right-hand side of the main editor window, although you can move it, like other dockable panels (see Fig.2). So now, pressing Tab “freezes” the editor window (a “pause” image appears in the middle) and moves the cursor over into the Properties panel. You can then move your attention across to the side of the window and change whatever properties you need to, before “un-pausing” the editor (which can be done by pressing Enter, the same key used to close the old Properties dialog) and then resume editing. So despite this fairly major change, because they have made the hotkeys do more or less the same job, you quickly get used to working with the new system. I can see why they decided to make this change since the old dialog-heavy interface was rather clunky and limited. For example, you can now select multiple components and simply change their properties via the panel, as you would do with a single component. In the past, to make multiple changes like that, you had to use the separate Inspector panel. Selection filter and select touching/inside Another function we often used in combination with the Inspector in earlier versions of Designer was the “Find Similar Objects” option. This is still present (see Fig.3) and it allows you to find a related group of elements in your PCB siliconchip.com.au (tracks, vias, components, text, etc) and then make mass changes to them. As noted above, the method for making those changes is different now but you can still use the Find Similar Objects menu option to actually select them if you don’t want to click on each one individually and you can’t just drag a box around them. This is especially important if there are hundreds of them and they aren’t all in one place! But AD18 now provides a number of other ways to select groups of objects, through both Selection Filters (Fig.4) and a much larger variety of selection modes (Fig.5). I can think of times that both of these new features would definitely have come in handy in the past. The Selection Filter lets you choose what type of objects are selected when you drag a box around them. The options are: Components, 3D Bodies, Keepouts, Tracks, Arcs, Pads, Vias, Regions, Polygons, Fills, Text, Rooms and Other. You can choose more than one option at a time and they’re all on by default. So for example, if you want to delete all the tracks and vias in a certain area of the board so you can route them again, you can simply set the Selection Filter to Tracks and Vias only, drag a box around that area, hit delete and away you go. There were methods for doing this in earlier versions (using Find Similar Objects) but they required more steps and you could easily make a mistake. Even more attractive are the new selection modes. Lasso select means you can draw an arbitrary shape on the PCB Fig.3: the Find Similar Objects dialog is a quick way to select objects on the board based on their properties. For example, you could select all objects with a particular footprint, all pads of a certain size and shape or all tracks of a certain width. Once they are selected, you can delete them or change some properties of all the matching objects with a few keystrokes or mouse clicks. Australia’s electronics magazine August 2018  37 Fig.4: the new selection filter window allows you to choose what type of objects are selected when you drag an outline around them. and select whatever is inside it. Hooray! Selecting irregular areas (which are of course quite common in PCB layouts) was a royal pain in the past. Now it’s easy. Also welcome is the ability to choose whether only those objects fully contained within the outline are selected (“select overlapped”), or whether any components which partially overlap that area (“touching rectangle”) are selected. Both modes come in handy at different times. The “Outside Area” selection would be handy if you wanted to delete all but a set of components, tracks, etc. I’ve used the “Select Touching Copper” option many times in the past (CTRL+H) but it’s now more easily accessible through this new selection menu, along with quite a few other useful options such as being able to select a “Net”, “All on Layer”, “Free Objects”, “All Locked” and “Off Grid Pads”. Next to this new Selection menu is a group of very useful alignment tools that lets you do things like move all component text to a specific location relative to the component (a real time saver but you do need to clean up the result), align a group of components by their centres or edges (horizontally or vertically), space components out evenly and so on. These would have been really handy to have when I was laying out boards with rows of LEDs, resistors, relays – there are many times that having those options would have saved a significant amount of time. The new floating toolbar at the top of the PCB editor also has a number of commonly used functions such as placing components, tracks, text, vias and so on – stuff that you use all the time is now in a more convenient location. Having said that, we tend to use keyboard shortcuts for most of these functions anyway, since that’s a lot faster than moving the mouse. the component libraries containing Analog Devices parts (around 5000 devices total), and they are only one of around one hundred manufacturers represented in the list. We added the top level “Analog Devices” library to our system and Fig.7 shows the list of devices that are made available. This includes both the schematic symbols and the PCB footprints. We haven’t checked to see just how complete these libraries are but we would guess, based on past experience, that while a large percentage of current ICs and semiconductors will be available, you will still occasionally come across components that you want to use in your design for which no library element is available. Still, we expect the Unified Components Library will save a lot of time and hassles when putting together a new design. And it should also reduce the risk that you make a mistake when creating a library element. We noticed while browsing these components that the software sometimes paused for several seconds while downloading data. Presumably, users with a faster internet connection will notice fewer delays. But you always have the option of copying the components that you want to use to a local file, to eliminate that delay. Simulation There are times where we have used ECAD software to draw the same circuit up twice – once to simulate it (using SPICE), to verify that it works, then again in a different piece of software to produce a netlist which is then used in the PCB layout process. For some time now, Altium has had the capability to run its own SPICE simulation, so you can avoid doing this work twice. To use this capability, all the components you place in your circuit need to have a model defined. This would normally be done in your libraries, however, you can add them to components after they have been placed if necessary. Like many Altium features, getting it to work the first time is quite fiddly but once you’ve learned the tricks, it is generally quite easy to work with. The first challenge was finding the library which contains the components you need for simulations, such as Libraries The only library supplied with AD18 is a set of “Miscellaneous Components” which has a few useful devices but if that’s all you got, you would be rather disappointed. Luckily, the reason that it only comes with the one library is that it’s really easy to pull in hundreds of manufacturerspecific component libraries from the Unified Components Libraries which are hosted on Altium servers. The procedure for doing this is not obvious the first time but once you know the trick, it’s really easy and the list of available components is vast. In the “Available Libraries” dialog, you need to select the “Install from server...” option, then enter a name (that you make up yourself) in the “Library name:” field. Next, click “Add” and it will download a list of libraries from the server (see Fig.6). You can add one or more of these libraries to your local library and the components will be merged together into a single, large list. There are so many libraries available that we can’t even come close to showing them all. Fig.6 shows just some of 38 Silicon Chip Fig.5: AD18 adds (or at least makes more accessible) many new selection modes which help you choose which objects on the board you want to move, delete, change, etc. Not shown here are the extra options available from the other icons on the new floating toolbar but they contain a number of very useful menus including those which allow you to align and arrange grids of similar objects. Australia’s electronics magazine siliconchip.com.au Fig.7: here we are are placing one of the 5000(!) components in just the Analog Devices library that was shown partially expanded in Fig.6. You get a preview of the schematic symbol and component footprint. In some cases, you even get supplier information, including which suppliers have it in stock and the cost. This information can then be used in the generated Bill of Materials. Fig.6: just a small subset of the Unified Component Libraries that can be pulled down from the Altium servers. You can select a subset of the parts available from a given manufacturer, based on their function, or simply pull in the whole lot if that suits you. You can also combine objects from multiple manufacturers into a single library on your system. siliconchip.com.au voltage sources, current sources and so on. This is necessary because normally, you would simply have a connector where power is fed in but Altium doesn’t know what the properties of the power source are going to be. So you need to tell it what voltages are present where, and you may also need to feed test signals into various inputs and so on. The library is supplied with AD18 but it doesn’t appear in the list of libraries by default. You have to select the “Install from file...” option and then browse to the following directory: C:\Users\Public\Documents\Altium\AD18\ Library\Simulation There, you will find five simulation libraries: Math Function, Pspice Functions, Sources (as mentioned above), Special Function and Transmission Line. Having added these, you can then add simulation elements into your schematic in the same way that you would add a normal component. We drew up a very simple circuit to simulate, shown in Fig.8. In doing so, we discovered that the “Comment” field, where we usually put the value of a component (which appears next to the component in both the schematic and on the PCB) is not suitable for the simulation. You have to instead add a separate “Value” property to the object. That’s a bit frustrating but once you know that you have to do it, it isn’t much extra work. Australia’s electronics magazine August 2018  39 Fig.8: a simple circuit that we drew up to test out the SPICE simulation features of Altium. R1 and C1 are standard components from our library but have the SPICE Simulation model field defined. V1 is a simulation-specific component, ie, a sinewave source. If you double-click on the VSIN Simulation model shown in the lower-right corner of the window, you can set its frequency, amplitude etc. Fig.9: the result of running a simulation on the schematic shown in Fig.8. A darker background would help make the waveforms more visible but you can see that the blue trace below is the sinewave from VSIN while the red trace above is the low-pass filtered version which lags the blue trace and has a slightly lower amplitude due to the action of the RC filter. You can then run the simulation by pressing F9 or via the Simulation menu. This menu also allows you to configure the simulation, although Altium does a good job of selecting a sensible set of default parameters. The resulting plot is shown in Fig.9. One of the features I liked is that you can specify beforehand which signals you want to plot so that you can close the simulation and get back to working on the circuit. Then later, when you re-run the simulation, the same plots appear. Here we are plotting the output of the sinewave source at the bottom, and the output of the low-pass filter at the top. This shows the default colour scheme which has particularly low contrast. We would be inclined to change this if we were going to use the simulation feature seriously. There doesn’t seem to be much point in having a grey background; a black one would make the plots much more visible. Anyway, you can see that the filter output at the top “lags” the input signal below and has a lower amplitude, so the simulation is doing a good job of representing the real behaviour of such a circuit. project, there is also a procedure to cause any changes which have been made in those modules to take effect in the overall project. Essentially, what they have done is added a form of hierarchical design to Altium and while this is not a feature we would use all the time, it certainly would come in handy for some of our more complex projects. Any project that involves combining more than one PCB will greatly benefit from using the new System Design features. Multi-board designs One of the new features added to AD18 is something we’ve been wanting for a while now: multi-board design capability. Previously, each project could contain multiple schematics but the parts from these schematics would automatically be deposited in a single board file. You could in theory design multiple boards in that file but especially in larger projects, that would not be practical. Now you use the Logical System Designer to tell Altium which schematics are associated with which modules and how those modules will be connected. You can then design separate PCBs for those modules. You can also design the physical connections between these various boards in the Multi-board Assembly editor. Similarly to the way that Altium handles pushing changes in a schematic through to its corresponding PCB file, when changes are made to the modules in a multi-board 40 Silicon Chip Improved auto-routing I’m generally not a fan of auto-routing, partly because it never really seems to do a very good job and partly because the router generally doesn’t understand important parts of PCB design such as correct ground routing. However, having tried the auto-routing in AD18, I have to say that it is very good and will definitely save me a lot of time in future. Fig.10 shows the result of auto-routing one of my designs after deleting all the existing tracks and vias. It took about 30 seconds to complete. Fig.11 shows the board that I routed by hand. Mine is a bit neater and has, I think, a better thought-out ground network. But the auto-routed version has slightly fewer vias and overall looks pretty good. (Of course, it helps that I did arrange the components carefully.) As well, the auto-routed version could be easily “cleaned up” to be as good (if not better) than my initial attempt. Doing that would be a lot faster than routing it from scratch. I certainly will be taking advantage of this in future! Even if you aren’t going to use auto-routing in your final design, it is worthwhile to run it in advance, just to see whether your board is even routable and where the problem areas may be. It could give you some clues about rearranging the components. AD18 also introduces a feature known as “ActiveRoute” which is a hybrid manual/automatic routing system. It seems quite handy but you would need to spend some time familiarising yourself with its operation to take full advantage of it. At its most basic level, you simply select one or a few Australia’s electronics magazine siliconchip.com.au Fig.10: one of our board designs which has been autorouted. There are a handful of design rule violations resulting in some areas being highlighted in green but these could easily be fixed manually. Overall, the result is fairly neat and logical and does not use an excessive number of vias or unduly looping tracks. Less manual tweaking would be needed if we took more time to configure the auto-router more carefully. Fig.11: this is the original, manually-routed version of the board shown in Fig.10. While it is a bit neater and more carefully routed in some areas, with thicker tracks where necessary to handle higher currents, it isn’t all that different from the auto-routed version. The job of manually running the tracks and polygon copper regions took many hours, compared to under a minute for the auto-router. pads or components at a time, then press Shift+A (or select the ActiveRoute menu item) and it then automatically routes as many of the connections on the selected object as it can. In this manner, you can save yourself the time spent actually running the tracks while still deciding the order in which the routes are made. It also appears to have the ability for you to set up rules to help guide the auto-router, to get it to do exactly what you want. This would be a real time saver on a complex board, especially one with FPGAs, CPUs and RAM. I think it’s a clever idea; for example, you could let the computer automatically route the “easy” tracks to save you time but then route the critical ones by hand. ous PCB layers, how the 3D version of the board is rendered and so on. It didn’t take a long time to set these up again but it would have been nice if the settings had been retained automatically. This is just something to keep in mind if you are upgrading. I also had to re-load my custom libraries into AD18 but this is a fairly simple step and only takes a couple of minutes. Compatibility Generally, we didn’t have any problems opening files created in earlier versions of Altium Designer in AD18. It will still open AutoTrax and Protel files; there are some problems with the imported files but that was true of previous versions as well. One interesting quirk we noticed is how it deals with rotated text in circuit diagrams. AD14 allowed you to “flip” text but this only had the effect of changing how it was aligned (by the left or right edge); the text remained “right-side-up”. AD18 now allows you to flip text upside-down if you want to. Unfortunately, it applies this to circuits drawn up in earlier versions of the software. So text that was right-side up when we created the circuit now reads as upside-down. This is not difficult to fix, of course, but it is a bit surprising. Major upgrades of Altium Designer are generally installed alongside existing versions rather than replacing them. For example, when I installed AD18, it left AD14 on my system and I can still go back and use that if necessary. But the installer does import the settings from the previous version so you don’t need to go through and customise it all over again. One group of settings that did not get imported, however, is the “View Configurations” which I had set up in AD14. These define the colours that are used to display the varisiliconchip.com.au The Vault This is a cloud-based storage system for your designs (schematics, PCBs, projects etc). It is potentially very useful when you have a team working on large and complex designs. Since we tend to operate at a more-or-less individual level at SILICON CHIP, we have not really made much use of this feature but it is available to Altium users so it is definitely worth considering. Unlike some other ECAD packages, you are not forced to use the Vault; you can still save all the files on your local computer or network drive if you prefer to do so. Conclusion Altium is a huge and very complex program and few users would know how to use all of its features. But I have to say that for something so complicated, mostly it is very well thought out and not all that difficult to figure out. And once you have mastered most of the features, you will be able to produce a very large design in a reasonable amount of time and with minimal chance for errors. One benefit to using Altium is that they have very good support. When I ran into a problem with one feature while writing this review, I sent them an email asking for help and got a response less than an hour later explaining what I was doing wrong. They also have active forums and a bug-tracking facility where you can report any problems that you encounter. For more information about Altium Designer and purchasing a licence, contact the Australian sales office at (02) 9410 1005 or email sales.au<at>altium.com SC Australia’s electronics magazine August 2018  41