New Publishing And Version Control Features From Altium

The latest release of Altium Designer incorporates new 'Design Insight' features targeted at helping designers browse documents and design information across an entire project. Intelligent and interactive pop-up document previews provide a fast and easy way to find and navigate to specific documents within a project, and to trace connectivity through multiple source files.

Altium Designer incorporates native support for standard version control systems and provides the ability to compare both electrical and spatial differences between graphical design files such as schematics and PCB layouts. In the latest release of Altium Designer, version control support has been enhanced and streamlined to allow common operations such as file comparisons and updates to happen in the background, providing minimal disruption to work flows.

A new publishing feature that enables the consolidation of selected documents into a single set targeted at a particular media type such as print or PDF makes it easier for designers to manage the propagation of design information to manufacturers, procurement, documentation and other teams that require specific input. Using this new feature, designers can publish the required information for each group in the most suitable form: electronic, web-based or hard copy. The definition of media output is saved as part of the design project, so information can be easily republished at any time.

As more functionality is moved from discrete components and consolidated within the 'soft' environment of programmable devices, unifying the various design processes involved becomes crucial. These new and enhanced capabilities within Altium Designer let electronics designers manage the increasingly complex design data and documents required to bring a product successfully to market.