Altium Designer 10 Ushers In Engineering Content Management

Taking a page from Product Lifecycle Management  (PLM), Altiumhas released a what it's calling a milestone upgrade to its EDA platform builtaround the idea of bringing smart data management capabilities to electronicsdesign.

At the heart of AltiumDesigner 10 are new engineering content management capabilities, includingan Enterprise Vault Server, aimed at unifying design-related data in a securelocation. Given the complexity of today's electronics design, enterprisevaulting capabilities are essential to accommodate the needs of disperseddesign teams, to facilitate multi-domain collaboration and to ensure reusableassets, according to Bob Potock, Altium's director of Americas marketing. Inaddition, as products become smaller and the clearances get tighter, there isless margin for error, hence the need for a central platform to secure IP andto facilitate collaboration.

"Electronics design is very mature in many respects, butwhat is more complicated is the design process," Potock explains. "Design teamsare now dispersed, and multi-domain collaboration is required. There is alsothe specialization of engineering with FPGA design teams, embedded softwareteam, RF teams and board-based team all collaborating with the ultimate goal ofbuilding product."

While the mechanical engineering discipline has embraceddata management tools and concepts to manage MCAD data, the electronics domainhas not been in the forefront, primarily due to the lack of tools, he says.Many electronics manufacturers still rely on paper-based processes to manageengineering changes-a process that can lead to a lot of rework not to mention,costly errors.

Altium Designer 10 debuts a variety of new technologies toaddress these issues. The new releases supports a unified data model so avariety of design data can be captured and stored in a central location, fromschematics to PCB layouts and embedded software development data. Altium Designer10 also ushers in what it dubs a "next-generation" Component Management System,a framework that manages components at the engineering level, in the design andacross release domains.  The frameworkextends existing models of storing and managing ECAD component data to capturebusiness intelligence along with where-used capabilities for tracking whereexactly components are used across any design or release document. Altium Designer10 also includes a new live supplier-linking system to provide real-timeupdates to pricing and availability information so designers can keep up withcomponent changes.

Thanks to technology gleaned from its acquisition of Morfik,the new Enterprise Vault Server is built as a Morfik xApp, which means it can beaccessed and managed through a Web interface. The new release also exploitscloud computing capabilities, allowing design engineers to store Altiumpreferences in the cloud so they can be automatically retrieved even fromanother computer.

The final piece of the Altium Designer 10 upgrade story isAltiumLive, a Web-based destination that the company bills as "a central accesspoint to all things Altium." The portal will function like a community whereusers can collaborate with peers as well as with Altium employees andengineers. There will also be a forum, a new BugCrunch system and capabilitiesfor delivering tool and functionality upgrades on a regular basis.