Solidworks PCB to Altium Designer
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Solidworks PCB to Altium Designer
In this migration guide we are going to focus on importing SOLIDWORKS PCB designs to Altium Designer.
If you need to migrate from another tool, please refer to their specific migration guide below or explore our Documentation page for tips on importing your designs.
- Migrating from Autodesk EAGLE to Altium Designer
- Migrating from Cadence OrCAD to Altium Designer
- Migrating from Siemens PADS to Altium Designer
- Migrating from KiCad EDA to Altium Designer
- Migrating from Zuken CADSTAR to Altium Designer
Preparing to Migrate Your Existing Data
Data migration can sometimes follow the “garbage in.... more garbage out” principle. However, with SOLIDWORKS PCB, there is no data loss and your exact information gets transferred during the import process to Altium Designer.
Step 1: Design data required for import
Make sure your design is clean and organized before performing the data migration from SOLIDWORKS PCB to Altium Designer. Here is a checklist that can help you:
- Schematic and Library considerations
- Schematic (.schdoc) and Library data (.schlib and .pcblib) are already compatible with Altium Designer and no changes are required before importing.
- PCB considerations
- For PCB data we need the SOLIDWORKS PCB Document (.swpcbdoc) file and design rules can be exported in a .rul format.
Step 2: Importing your data into Altium Designer
1. Open the SOLIDWORKS PCB Project (.prjpcb) in Altium Designer, and you will see all of your project files in a similar structure as Altium Designer projects. The image below shows a project structure without a PCB file.
Schematic and other project will open directly in Altium Designer
2. For the next step, we need to add a New PCB document into the same project by right-clicking on the project file and selecting Add New to Project >> PCB.
3. Next, select File>> Import>> Altium PCB and then select the .swpcbdoc file from the SOLIDWORKS PCB folder.