Multi PCB Ltd. supports Altium Designer

Altium Designer combines the design of hardware, software and programmable hardware in one unified design environment, allowing effective cooperation both within design teams and across entire organisations.

The latest release of Altium Designer features faster real-time 3D design performance. New capabilities help designers manage the release of their designs to manufacture. New concepts let designers explore future techniques and design possibilities, and help exploit the potential of programmable devices. A new Field Instrumentation dashboard helps designers overcome some of the challenges of testing or remotely monitoring designs inside FPGAs. And a new plug-and-play Software Platform Builder helps designers quickly 'snap' together systems and exploit a standard set of services within the 'soft' hardware environment created inside programmable devices.

Increases in packaging density and layer counts are making data export issues ever more difficult for designers: ‘mil’ or ‘mm,’ leading or trailing, mirrored or un-mirrored? These are just a few of the questions, which have to be answered during the design process.

The safest and most elegant solution is to send the basic layout data to the PCB manufacturers and leave the generation of production data to them. As part of customer support at Multi PCB Ltd, it is now possible to directly import and process Altium Designer data. This free service prevents customer export errors and speeds up the rest of the process.

Klaus Schindler, chief CAM station engineer at Multi PCB Ltd. commented: “The Multi PCB direct data import helps prevent errors and eliminates queries. In addition to the existing import options (Gerber, Eagle, Target and Sprint Layout), we can now also import Altium Designer data and develop production data from that. The direct ODB++ export of Altium Designer is an additional useful feature of this superb programme.

Multi PCB Ltd also offers another free service that provides further data security: all production data undergo a design rule check intended to highlight inconsistencies and check fitness for manufacture.