Come fly with me

In a move aimed at helping board designers to have a better understanding of their products, Altium has added 3d visualisation capabilities to its Altium Designer software. According to the company, the enhancement will allow information to be shared more readily amongst design teams, as well as extend use into the manufacturing, repair and service sectors. The capability has been included in release 6.8 of Altium Designer. Frank Hoschar, Altium’s vp EMEA for sales and support, said the upgrade is unifying system on board design, embedded software development and fpga development. But the release is also targeted at a wider range of users. “We’re seeing more non pcb experts using circuit blocks and library components, then placing them in a new system,” he said. “These users need more visualisation to help them understand what they are doing.” The latest release allows designers to ‘look’ underneath components and, said Hoschar, it’s useful to not have to imagine how vias and components sit on top of each other.Altium Designer 6.8 also offers unified hardware/software compilation, taking standard C code and producing a combination of compiled object code and fpga targeted rtl output.