Patrick Züger from GPV Switzerland, a massive fabricator and assembly facility across Europe and China, delivered a great talk at AltiumLive in Europe. He shares his feedback and design process with and as an Altium Designer® Beta User. We discuss his initial impressions of Altium Designer 20.
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Show Highlights:
A: “It is a refinement of Altium Designer 18 and the new concept of Altium. New features such as the updating of the routing engine, new schematic render, and dynamic compiler are important.”
A: “About six to eight weeks.”
A: “My favorite is the routing improvement. It’s much easier to move around different tracks and rearrange them, making the work proceed much faster. Next favorite is the dynamic compilation, and also something I’ve waited for a long time is the creepage rule—I was very happy to see it.”
A: “Even in Beta, I feel it’s very good, very stable, and I already use it for small designs.”
A: “Impressive, intelligent, fast, forward-thinking, and smooth.”
A: “That’s difficult to answer because I only use Altium Designer - for me, it’s the best tool.”
A: “For me, it’s the clean up of the component properties panel in the schematic, the overview is much better now.”
A: “The efficiency of the new routing engine, before I’d have to delete all tracks and start over, but now I can rearrange them.”
A: “The output files where you configure your settings to get the data out haven’t had much done to them for some time, and I think there’s room for more efficiency and automation.”
A: “It does not affect me directly as we don’t have many high-speed designs, but it makes much more sense.”
A: “No, I don’t think so. Maybe one area is with huge boards, where Altium Designer does tend to be a bit slow, but Altium Designer can handle any normal design.”
A: “The 3D capabilities, the ACTIVEBOM® with the manufacturer part search, I love that feature. It’s awesome, and of course the new routing engine.”
A: “Firstly its ease of use, the 3D capabilities, the beta program, the big community, for example, all our educational institutions use Altium Designer. I think it’s the best value for money, and very importantly Altium listens to their users.”
Links and Resources:
Patrick Zuger AltiumLive Presentation
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UserName: AltiumLive2019
PW: Altium2019