Altium Designer » Announcement: Update 21 for Altium Designer

The Altium Development team are pleased to announce the 21st update for Altium Designer.

This release focuses on additional enhancements to Altium Designer, with the key highlights being:

Improvements to Re-Annotate:

Re-annotate has been improved and now includes options for what to re-annotate (top & bottom, top only, bottom only, selected), and optionally allows for the protection of components with locked designators. Another new option is a user-definable location tolerance (Comparison Threshold), which allows components that are slightly out of line to still be annotated in a logical manner. Re-annotate now also uses the component bounding rectangle (without designator), where it previously used the bounding rectangle that included the designator, which could result in undesirable annotation results. Read more in the Wiki.

Auto-Zoom in Cross Select Mode:

Auto-zooming in Cross Select Mode has been enabled, with three options available: No Zoom, Zoom to Last Selected, and Zoom to All. Read more in the Wiki.

Updated Support for Vendor Tools:

Xilinx ISE v14.1 and Altera QuartusII v11.1 and v12.0 are now supported.

There are an additional 25 new enhancements included in this release, with half being a result of requests made through BugCrunch alone, and many of the remaining being a result of forum posts and support cases. So please keep the reports coming!

Full details of this update can be found in the release notes.

Accessing the Update

To update your Altium Designer installation, first ensure you are using a license with valid subscription. Proceed 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.

This release includes changes to our Run Time Libraries, which requires the majority of modules to be updated. For those users who experience a lengthy update process due to anti-virus programs, using the full download option becomes a much faster process. For more info, see Wiki.

Installation of the updated modules will bring their revision up to 10.1181.24817. The Platform Build number will also update to 10.1181.24817 as the Altium Designer Base module is updated.

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, the Installer and Uninstaller can be downloaded from the Software page in AltiumLive - download the latest Installer/Uninstaller.