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Altium Designer 24 Review by Tim Blythman Each year brings a new version of Altium Designer. We have spent a while trying out Altium Designer 24 and exploring its latest features. This review covers our findings and includes support for the exciting new 3D-MID technology. A ltium Designer 24 is the latest version of the Altium Designer EDA (electronic design automation) software, released late last year. We use Altium Designer to create practically all our PCB designs, so we are pretty familiar with it. We tested version 24.0.1 for this review. As has been the case for a few years, incremental updates have been released for Altium Designer on a monthly basis. Sometimes, very new and upcoming features can be enabled for trial (‘beta’) by enabling an option in the Advanced Settings dialog. Some of the new features we tested may have been available for a while, even appearing in versions of Altium Designer from late last year. We always seem to find some new tools or options that are handy and helpful. The web page at www.altium.com/ altium-designer/whats-new lists changes by version. You can also see planned future features at www. altium.com/altium-designer/coming-­ soon Depending on your beta settings, product access level and installed version, some of these features may or may not be available. More information about features and their corresponding subscription requirements can be found at www.altium.com/ altium-designer/subscription We quite like the simplified Gerber export dialog box that we noted in our review of Altium Designer 23 (March 2023; siliconchip.au/Article/15697). There is now also a simplified License Management page, shown in Screen 1 below. It includes only the most relevant information, and the option to hide expired licenses means there aren’t any unnecessary items that you have to scroll past. It’s a small change, but making the simple tasks easy is always helpful. PCB CoDesign Many of our projects use Altium Designer for the basic steps of ‘schematic capture’ (drawing a circuit diagram on a computer), PCB layout and Gerber export. Gerber files are what PCB manufacturers use to produce circuit boards. Nearly all of our designs are handled by one person from concept to completion due to their relative simplicity. However, more complex designs might require a large team working together to complete a PCB. Screen 1: the License Management screen has been simplified to make the most useful buttons and data visible. Expired licenses can be hidden, and essential status information is displayed clearly. 64 Silicon Chip Australia's electronics magazine siliconchip.com.au Screen 3: it’s easy to import a STEP file into Altium Designer to visualise how a 3D model of a mechanical part, such as an enclosure, will fit the PCB. The 3D view can even detect conflicts and collisions. Keeping the efforts of many workers synchronised is not a simple task, and Altium has released tools over the last few years to keep things such as component libraries consistent and up to date. The Altium 365 Workspace is one example. PCB CoDesign allows multiple people to work on the same PCB without causing conflicts, by resolving and handling differences within the Workspace (see Screen 2). Electronic design automation You might think that Altium Designer is just about PCB design, but it can do much more than that, even if that is what we usually use it for. The concept of electronic design automation (EDA) stretches beyond just PCB design, and Altium Designer incorporates several features in addition to designing circuit diagrams and circuit boards. For electronic engineers, mechanical computer-aided design (MCAD) typically encompasses mechanical parts like enclosures and heatsinks. MCAD is well-covered by other programs. Our review of Altium Designer 21 (January 2021, siliconchip.au/­ Article/14705) noted software plugins that allow the integration of mechanical designs into Altium projects. Supported MCAD tools include Solidworks, PTC Creo, Autodesk Inventor, Autodesk Fusion 360 and Siemens NX. These plugins work both ways, allowing electronic and mechanical engineers to see how their respective designs mesh together. The siliconchip.com.au Screen 4: a STEP file representing the PCB can be exported for use in 3D modelling programs, in this case a populated Breadboard PSU PCB with all components present. You can also export the PCB without 3D components. plugins allow changes to be easily seen and acted upon. Even if you aren’t a user of one of the fully-featured MCAD programs Altium Designer supports, you can still do simple things like importing and exporting 3D models to see if they mechanically align with the PCB. With many parts suppliers now providing 3D models of their offerings, it’s easy to validate a design’s complete assembly without having to buy all the parts first. 3D printers are now commonplace, so this feature will simplify the checking of custom parts before they are even 3D printed. If you have a STEP file, checking it is as easy as using the Place → 3D Body menu selection. The object can be positioned and rotated to check its alignment with other parts. You can even change the colour or transparency to help visualise how the parts combine. Screen 3 shows our Pico Analyser PCB being aligned with a model of its Jiffy box in the Altium Designer 3D viewer. Conversely, you can export a 3D model of the PCB itself; this can include or exclude 3D component bodies, which would be much the same as Screen 2: an example of the PCB CoDesign interface from Altium. Australia's electronics magazine August 2024  65 the model being either a populated or unpopulated PCB. This can be handy if you want to design an enclosure around an existing PCB design or test a PCB’s fit into an enclosure. Screen 4 shows an exported STEP file placed into a 3D printing program, with all components included. We’ve even heard of people 3D-printing the shape of the PCB so that they can test its fit into an enclosure before the fabricated PCB arrives! Many electronics products rely on wiring harnesses as part of their construction, and now Altium Designer can be used to design and lay out wiring harnesses. Harnesses can also be incorporated into a multi-board design. We’ll discuss the Harness Designer feature of Altium Designer 24 later. Another emerging technology in the EDA field is 3D-MID, a 3D fabrication technique that blurs the line between PCB and enclosure. 3D-MID Our 2021 review also covered Altium Designer’s support for flexible and mixed (combining rigid and flexible) PCBs. Many PCB manufacturers (including those accessible to hobbyists) can now produce flexible PCBs, and they are clearly useful when space in an enclosure is tight or a rigid PCB is not feasible. Altium Designer 24 introduces support for 3D-MID (three-dimensional mechatronic integrated device) technology. At the time of writing, the 3D-MID feature is at the beta stage and must be specifically enabled as a beta feature. With a 3D-MID design, the substrate to which components are fitted is a 3D plastic part instead of a flat or flexible PCB. The part could be 3D printed (in the case of a prototype) or made by injection moulding for mass production. The traces are added directly to the part using a technique known as laser direct structuring (LDS). In LDS, the plastic contains additives that are activated by a laser, which scans over the part after it has been formed. The activated regions can then be selectively plated with a conductive trace material such as copper, nickel or gold. Solder paste is applied, and components are mounted to the traces using traditional solder reflow technology, supplemented by adhesives as needed. The substrate material is chosen to work with the required temperatures for reflow. Effectively, the enclosure or other mechanical part replaces or supplements the PCB. This sort of technology is already used to embed simple PCB-trace circuitry like antennas and touch sensors into devices like mobile phones. Still, we expect more complex applications will be developed. Altium Designer 24’s 3D-MID design process is not too different from that needed for standard 2D PCB designs. A circuit diagram is drawn, and component footprints and packages are selected, just as in a design intended for a PCB. But instead of a layer stackup, a 3D STEP or IGES file is imported and used as the substrate. Like a 2D design, the following steps are to place the components, connect them with traces and validate the layout with a design rules check, although we anticipate there will be new factors and design constraints to be considered. For example, the component’s orientation in 3D space must be considered as it definitely affects the placement step. We expect that simulation of the RF and emissions performance would Screen 5: 3D-MID is a new technology that allows customised 3D parts to be used in place of standard PCB substrates, including flexible and mixed substrates. Altium Designer’s 3D-MID tool allows a circuit to be translated into a 3D-MID design, which can be exported for use in the LDS process that creates conductive traces on the surface of a plastic part. Screen 6: the View Options tab of the View Configuration panel allows the 2D and 3D views of a PCB design to be customised. This makes it easier to visually check the design and see what it would look like with different solder mask and silkscreen printing colours. 66 Silicon Chip Australia's electronics magazine siliconchip.com.au need to happen during the design of the 3D part, and possibly again once the components and traces have been laid out. Once the layout is finalised, production files are produced. Instead of Gerber files, the output is a file that can be used by the LDS process. Screen 5 is a sample 3D-MID design from the Altium website. Support for features like vias appears to be limited at this stage. Still, we expect this concept will be a rapidly evolving aspect of EDA and look forward to a time when custom-­ metallised 3D parts are as cheap and accessible as PCBs are. Viewing options Even if you don’t have the means to undertake a 3D-MID design, there are some enhancements to the 3D PCB viewer that make it easier to understand how a standard PCB fits together in both 2D and 3D space. In the View Configuration panel (accessible from the Panels menu), the View Options tab has options to customise both 2D and 3D views. Various colour schemes can be chosen so you can see how your PCB looks with different silkscreen and solder mask colours. Screen 6 shows the View Options tab. You can tweak the transparency to see how the various layers align, seeing things that would typically not be visible in a regular 3D perspective. Similar options also apply to 2D views. Section View You can also use the Section View (View → Toggle Section View when in 3D mode) to look at cross-sections, achieving views that would not otherwise be visible. Screen 7 shows the PCB from our ESR Test Tweezers using Section View. The view can also be customised from the Section View tab of the View Configuration panel. The sectioning planes are changed by simply dragging the arrows in the viewport. Harness Designer Altium often presents webinars aimed at demonstrating new and upcoming features, including those available through the beta program. A webinar we saw during our review of Altium Designer 23 noted the then-upcoming Harness Designer siliconchip.com.au Screen 7: Section View allows further inspection of a PCB design by allowing sections to be ‘cut’ through a design. The View Configuration panel also offers a Section View tab for customising that view. feature. Wiring harnesses are another facet of EDA, and the Harness Designer allows harnesses to be created as a standalone project or as part of a multiboard assembly. Altium Designer 24 allows the creation of a harness design project as a PrjHar file. Just as a PCB project typically contains a schematic file (SchDoc) and a PCB file (PcbDoc), the harness project has a wiring diagram (WirDoc file) and a layout drawing (LdrDoc file), with roughly analogous roles to the schematic and PCB files. Altium Designer Draftsman can then create views, bills of materials (BoMs) and engineering drawings (HarDwf file) of a harness. Screen 8 shows these stages of a harness design project. Draftsman can create engineering drawings for PCBs, too, and we covered that feature in the June 2022 review of Altium Designer 22 (siliconchip.au/Article/15348). Draftsman drawings of PCBs can include elements such as tables, 2D and 3D views, layer stackups and bills of materials. If there is the need to revise the documents (such as PCB or harness layout) used to create the drawings, the Draftsman document can be updated by simply selecting Tools → Import Changes. Layout Replication We mentioned Reuse Blocks in the Altium Designer 23 Review. Reuse Australia's electronics magazine Blocks are circuit snippets, usually with circuit and PCB elements. The block encapsulates the component wiring and also the PCB trace layout. It’s ideal if you use a similar component block in multiple projects. Layout Replication is a similar concept. However, it is better suited to laying out repeated component blocks on the same PCB rather than maintaining a block for later use in another design. Thus, it is accessed from within the PCB editor. With many designs having some repeated elements, this feature is bound to take some of the tedium out of PCB layouts. Effectively, it allows you to transfer a layout from one group of components to another group of the same components. Importantly, Altium Designer looks for the same connectivity between the same components, so if you have copied and pasted part of a circuit diagram, layout replication is likely to be helpful in duplicating the layout of those parts between the copies. You can choose how much of the layout (such as internal and external routing) is copied. Naturally, you can tweak the layout afterwards if identical layouts are not appropriate due to space or other design constraints. A block can also duplicate the layout of items like component designators. Screen 9 shows the PCB Layout Replication dialog box, opened from the August 2024  67 Tools menu. We used it to place and route the components shown at upper right, so they matched those at upper left. We just had to select Target Block 1 and press the Replicate button! We found it very easy to use and it saved a lot of time. It can even process multiple target groups at the same time, and the results are consistent and tidy. This is a feature we will undoubtedly use in laying out future designs. series of videos, each focusing on a specific aspect of using Altium Designer. The videos can also be found on the Altium Academy YouTube channel at www.youtube.com/<at> AltiumAcademy The Certificates section opens a web page explaining Altium’s paid training courses. Even if you aren’t an Altium subscriber, you can access much of the free content from https:// my.altium.com/ Education Product access The Home page of the Altium Designer program presents various educational and learning opportunities, as shown in Screen 10. It’s clear that Altium wants its users to be able to make the best use of the program’s features. The Design Secrets category is a While researching this article, we noticed that much of the online documentation states that some features are only available at certain product access levels. It may be the case that certain features that we’ve described will not be available to all users. As we mentioned earlier, this will depend on your beta settings, product access level and installed version. Access to beta features is controlled from within the Advanced Settings window of System Preferences. Free stuff Some Altium content can be accessed online for free. Videos like those from the Altium Academy mentioned earlier can be seen on YouTube. Altium 365 also has a free online file viewer at www.altium.com/viewer There is even the option of a free trial of the Altium Designer software. You can find out more about that at www.altium.com/altium-designer/ free-trial If you’re a hobbyist, Altium’s CircuitMaker software (https://­circuitmaker. com) can be used at no cost. We reviewed it in the January 2019 issue (siliconchip.au/Article/11378). CircuitMaker has a similar feel to Altium Designer and allows designs to be easily shared with others. You can see projects that other people have created at https://circuitmaker. com/Projects Summary Screen 8: this shows the order of the different stages of a Harness Design in Altium Designer, from top to bottom. The top shows the wiring diagram to which you can connect wires, connectors and splices. The second document shows the layout drawing, while the final products are the engineering drawings that can be created by Draftsman for production. 68 Silicon Chip Australia's electronics magazine Altium continues to add useful features to the Altium Designer software and provides great support to educate current and potential users. Many of the new features target advanced users who create multilayer PCB designs with high-speed requirements and advanced constraints. That’s often very different to our own PCBs, which are nearly always straightforward two-layer affairs. But we always find something useful to us in new Altium Designer releases. Layout Replication is a tool we are sure we will use in the future. The numerous 3D import and export options, tools and viewers are very handy for checking, visualising and validating a design as it develops. The concept of 3D-MID is fascinating, and we imagine it will find many novel and interesting applications. The availability of cheap, custom PCB designs has made electronics very accessible, and we look forward to a time when 3D-MID technology is available to the likes of hobbyists as well. Visit www.altium.com/altium-­ designer for more information on Altium Designer 24. SC siliconchip.com.au Screen 9: we found Layout Replication a handy tool for laying out and routing repeated groups of components. It is easy to use, and multiple target blocks can be processed with different options. It’s now easy to produce neat PCB layouts with repeated elements. Screen 10: Altium Designer’s Home tab provides links to numerous educational videos and webinars. Even if you don’t have an Altium license or subscription, much of the material is freely available online. siliconchip.com.au Australia's electronics magazine August 2024  69