Altium announces Altium Designer 12

CARLSBAD, USA: Altium, developer of next-generation electronics design software and services, announced Altium Designer 12, the evolution of the award winning unified electronics design solution Altium Designer. Altium Designer 12 was introduced during embedded world in Nuremberg, Germany, one year after the initial launch of AltiumLive and a new Altium Designer 10 platform.

With Altium Designer 12, Altium will continue its successful path which:
* Provided the structure for a content-delivery platform that fundamentally changed the way new features and enhancements can be delivered,
* Offered advanced board layout capabilities, powerful next-generation design data and release management systems, and
* Integrated access to Altium's growing pool of online design content and software enhancements.

With this new approach, Altium Subscription customers have already benefited from 16 product updates within the last 12 months, all of which refined and extended the already powerful capabilities of Altium Designer.

Unique delivery model
With Altium Designer 12, Altium Subscription users will further benefit from an industry leading software delivery model. Unlike previous new versions, Altium Designer 12 will not be a large and potentially disruptive software upgrade – it will be delivered as part of, and further solidify, Altium's continuous update model. This means that new features and functionality, as well as improvements and bug fixes, can be rolled out instantly and directly to Subscription users.

Altium's powerful cloud-based infrastructure supports this platform for continuous updates to customers. The Plug-In Manager within Altium Designer gives users full control over which part of Altium Designer to install, and instant visibility into updates and installations.

Altium Designer 12 – reliable, refined, robust
Altium Designer 12 is comprised of the development work, continuous updates and system enhancements from the last 12 months. Some of the key features delivered to Altium Subscription customers include:

Custom Pad Shapes: Non-standard pad shapes, switch contacts, metal shielding and more can now be created easily out of complex structures while the masks are still managed automatically based on rules.

No ERC directives: This design directive is placed on a node in the circuit to suppress reported warning and/or error violation conditions (such as an unconnected pin), while still performing a comprehensive check of the rest of the circuit.

Greater control in High-Speed Designs: Impedance controlled routing is an integral part of managing signal integrity for critical signals on a PCB. The algorithms, which calculate the track width based on the PCB layer stack, include more physical parameters of the PCB to produce better results.

Full access to AltiumLive content store
Altium Subscription customers can access the continuum of Altium Designer updates and thousands of ready to use board-level components (incl. live links into the supply chain), software plugin modules, design templates, reference designs and a growing library of example projects through the AltiumLive Content Store. Through Partnerships with key board-level component manufacturers such as STMicoelectronics, Altera, FTDI and Atmel, hundreds of new up-to-date components have already been released in 2012.

An Altium Designer Custom Board Implementation license for complete concept-through-manufacture design is available for $5,495.