altium designer student version on multiple computers

#Altium designer student version on multiple computers software

This visibility can be extended down to individual components on specific boards.īy far, the best tool available for putting together all the pieces of a PCB product is Altium Designer. One capability that exhibits this is the ability to hide,Īnd make visible certain portions of the multi-board design, as shown in Figs. The multi-design environment in Altium Designer promotes this collaboration. Whether based upon expertise or to facilitate efficient PCB design and development there are times when multiple designers work on different aspects of a single design. 6 Highlighting from MbaDoc Multi-board Design with Multiple Users Or from the design itself, as shown in Fig. This capability allows you to highlight and access portions of your multi-board design from the project structure listing as shown in Fig.

#Altium designer student version on multiple computers software

4 Adding Cases Working with workspacesĪltium is an integrated unified PCB design and development software environment, where designers can simultaneously access schematics, PCBs and BOMs. The Multiboard Assembly panel has three icons for adding to your multi-board project. Like other projects, multi-board projects may be accessed from the File menu at the top left of the main window or from the Panels tab in the lower right corner. The easiest way to create a multi-board design is to create a multi-board project (*.PrjMbd) and simply add existing PCBs.

These in turn may be compiled into multiple PCBs. Another way to work with schematics that span several pages or contain several definable sub-circuits is to create separate schematics for each page. This design is helpful to simplify a design as well as to allow for large complicated designs that may span several pages to be constrained within a smaller single page working environment. Schematics may be created in levels, wherein a top level schematic may contain multiple lower level schematics. The preferred way to do this is to first create multiple schematics. It is also possible to segment a schematic into sub-circuits that may then be separately compiled into multiple PCBs. Normally, a single schematic is compiled into a single PCB, a simple step-by-step procedure. Creating a multi-board designĪ multi-board design may be created in the following ways: Once a MbaDoc has been created, you enjoy much the same capability that you have with a single *.PcbDoc. The Multiboard Assembly panel, shown at right in the figure, provides a listing of the components, which typically are the boards (*.PcbDoc files including component listings) and case designs in the form of *.step files. In Altium Designer software, multi-board assemblies are denoted by *.MbaDoc and its contents are referred to as components. 1, above, a multi-board assembly design is shown along with a listing of the 'components' it contains. 1 Multi-board design with Multi-board Assembly Fortunately, the Multi-board Assembly functionality of Altium Designer software, was developed with you in mind.įig. Therefore, you may find yourself frustrated and your projects requiring more time than you would like or have to complete.

The problem is that most PCB design software packages do not target this as a priority. If your organization works on complex printed circuit board designs that are comprised of multiple circuits, each of which may have its own board, then you engage in multi-board design. Multi-board Design with Multi-board Assembly Let’s take a look at this unified design tool, multi-board assembly, multilayer PCB, and system design and how it simplifies the processing of putting all the pieces of your multi-board design together. You should be able to clearly understand where traces need to go for a signal with the tools and layout to communicate a multi board system to a design team. After all, your boards should not have an unmanageable design process to them. These issues are exacerbated when the multi-board design is being done by multiple designers.įortunately, the developers of Altium Designer ® have built-in specific functionality that allows you and your colleagues to easily build and collaborate on multi-board designs.

Not only are the circuit board layout steps multiplied by X (the total number of PCBs), but they also have to be interconnected. It reminds me of one the more daunting problems for engineers and PCB designers, which is multi-board design. Although, I love the crossword puzzles where you complete the words from a given clue, I think puzzles that require you to put the pieces together can be the most challenging, especially when it is a group activity. Brain games are a good way to stay sharp. One of my favorite ways to implement this is by doing daily puzzles.