Altium Designer 16 Is Now Available

Nikolay Ponomarenko
|  Created: February 21, 2017  |  Updated: September 25, 2020

Altium Designer® 16 is here! This release is available now as a free upgrade to all Altium Subscription customers and can be downloaded on the Altium Products Download page. Not an Altium Subscription customer? Contact our support team now to upgrade.

This release is all about tapping into your true design potential and includes powerful new features to accelerate your PCB design workflow. From productivity-focused enhancements to intelligent automation wizards, you’ll get your PCBs done faster than ever with Altium 16. Here’s what’s new:

Alternative Part Choice System

Have complete control over your component selection process by specifying alternative part choices while designing with the Alternative Part Choice System. Include pin compatible backup part choices directly on your and automatically substitute part numbers if needed.

New Alternative Part Choice System in Altium 16

Streamlined Design Rule Query Editor

Easily create and manage your advanced design rule queries with the new Design Rule Query Editor. Understand exactly how your queries interact together and avoid any conflicting rules with an organized query management interface.

Streamlined Design Rule Query Editor in Altium 16

Integrated TASKING® Pin Mapper

Share design data instantly between your PCB and embedded software project with the integrated Pin Mapper. Seamlessly share pin assignments, processor chip identifiers, and symbol names between Altium and your toolset.

Integrated Pin Mapper in Altium 16

3D STEP Model Generation Wizard

Easily generate the most realistic, accurate, and data-rich 3D models with the 3D STEP Model Generation Wizard. With realistic 3D STEP models you’ll get an exact representation of your physical board in real-time Native 3D.

3D STEP Model Generation Wizard in Altium 16

Visual Clearance Boundaries

Clearly understand the impact of your routing decisions in real-time with visual clearance boundaries. See clearance boundaries between traces and components visual as you route and design the most accurate and error-free board possible.

New Visual Clearance Boundaries in Altium 16

Component Placement System

Design the most organized and efficient board layouts with a new component placement system. Dynamically place and drag components that push, avoid, and snap-to alignment with other objects on your board layout.

New Component Placement System in Altium 16

You can see all of these new features in action on the Altium What’s New page.

How to Upgrade

Head on over to the Altium Products Download page to download the installer for Altium 16.

Not a current Altium customer? Get started with all the new features in Altium 16 with a free 30 day trial.

About Author

About Author

Nikolay currently serves as a Software Product Manager at Altium where he oversees the complete development lifecycle for Altium Vault. He brings over 5 years of software development experience to the team and graduated from Pre-Azov State Technical University in Mariupol where he studied informatics and applied mathematics.

Related Resources

Related Technical Documentation

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