Altium has long since ported the software to 64-bit architecture, which improves the performance especially for larger designs. The new features of Altium Designer 20 are summarized on their website, so it doesn’t really make sense to discuss them here (plus, we’ll be migrating to Altium Designer 21 soon). The introduction of Altium Designer didn’t mean that we never used other CAD software, as we do when working on projects from external designers, but that illustrated how user-friendly Altium Designer is, especially when it comes to creation and maintenance of custom-made schematic and PCB libraries. Previously, all schematics were redrawn by our graphical department and the result had to be “manually” checked with the original. One of the reasons for choosing Altium Designer 6 was because the schematic editor offers graphical features (such as selecting different line thicknesses and fonts) that are missing in other CAD packages, so that the schematics could immediately be drawn and published in the trusted Elektor style. The older version still keeps working and it is quite reassuring that you can, if necessary, go back to a more familiar trusted version.Īltium Designer is an enormously extensive and powerful PCB CAD tool, which offers far more functionality than is needed for the designs that Elektor usually publishes.

It is a relief that the familiar key combinations (hotkeys) still have the same functionality other software manufacturers could learn something from this.

This isn’t to say that nothing else has changed in Altium Designer 20, but as with the previous upgrade, the settings were automatically imported and you can work with the standard operations just as with Altium Designer 14. Thankfully, you get used to it very quickly. When we upgraded from Altium Designer 14 to Altium Designer 20, the change initially seemed to be a lot bigger, which is largely due to the new, dark GUI.quite a difference from the light backgrounds we were used to. Read on to learn exactly why! Getting started with a new version Recently, we updated to Altium Designer 20, and frankly, I didn’t expect to get as excited about this new version as I am now. As I recall, for the designs we normally made in the Elektor Lab, there weren’t that many significant changes or new features that we really needed, actually. Most - if not all - settings were automatically copied into this newer version and the user interface didn’t change much, so we could start using Altium Designer 14 (almost) immediately. Software updates can be time consuming, but in this case everything worked fine. After our initial investment, we skipped several subsequent updates, until Altium Designer 14 was released. Some time ago, Elektor started using Altium Designer 6, after working for years with Cadence OrCAD for schematics and Ultiboard for PCB design.

Altium designer 15 eagle