Announcement: Update 16 for Altium Designer 10

The Altium Development team are pleased to announce the 16th update for Altium Designer 10.

This release focuses on further enhancements to Altium Designer, with some of the notable inclusions being:

Improvements to impedance and width calculations:

This release delivers enhanced control for High Speed signal routing in Altium Designer through improvements in the application of trace routing rule calculations. These can be found in the Impedance Formula Editor in the Layer Stack Manager, which now offers more accurate default formulas for impedance and width calculations.

Specifically, to provide better control for material layers, new variable keywords have been added to the equation Helper including:

ErAbove; ErBelow – define material above or below the trace.
DielectricHeightAbove; DielectricHeightBelow – define dielectric thickness above or below the trace.

Export Free Pad Holes:

Altium Designer's support for STEP files allows detailed and accurate modeling data to be interchanged with mechanical CAD and 3D modeling programs. When defining an OutJob for exporting STEP files, a new option has been added to "Export Free Pad Holes" in addition to the existing options to export electrical and mechanical component holes. Designers using Free Pad Holes for board mounting or other purposes can now easily pass this information into the MCAD domain via an exported STEP file.

In total, 3 BugCrunch items have been included in this latest update along with various other enhancements; all of which can be found in the release notes.

The delivery of this update affects the following 8 modules:

1. System Component category: Altium Designer Base, Altium Designer Installation System, PCB System, Schematic System
2. FPGA Design Tools: Aldec Simulator
3. Importers and Exporters: Exporter - Ansoft
4. Output Generators: Output - Gerber, Output - STEP, Printer - Schematic

Because the development in this release is contained to only 8 modules, we are using the patching system to deliver the update.The download size of this update is 10MB. Note though, the patching system works on your download cache so if you have cleared the cache since installing, it will require some modules (or all, depending on when you did it) to update using the previous update system, thus applying the full update to these modules.

Installation of the updated modules will bring their revision up to 10.890.23450. The Platform Build number will also update to 10.890.23450 as the Altium Designer Base module is updated.

To update your Altium Designer 10 installation, first ensure you are using a license with valid subscription. Then, go to the Plug-in page (DXP >> Plug-ins and Updates) and select “Update All”. If you don’t see the update, use the “Refresh” link in the top right hand corner of the Plugins page.

Note: If you are using a Private Server license or Standalone license and you have renewed your subscription since activation, you will be required to reactivate your license to obtain this and future updates.

For those who installed directly from DVD, you can access the updates by changing a setting in preferences: System >> Installation Manager, change the Remote Repository Location to http://installation.altium.com

If you are wanting to install a new build containing this update, we have also released a new version of the Altium Installer and Uninstaller. These can be downloaded from the Software page in AltiumLive - download the latest Installer/Uninstaller.