Solving annotation hassles in design re-use

Altium Designer’s schematic Device Sheets make it easy to implement your previous work in new designs, which makes the most of your creative efforts and reduces design times.

But the real trick is properly integrating those re-used schematic sheets into the rest of the design, and in particular, managing the component annotation.

Complex Custom Selection Tools made EASY

Altium Designer has some nice ways of selecting and editing objects - such as Find Similar Objects, the Filter panel, and the highlighting engine.

You can also save your favourite queries, and even put them under custom toolbar buttons, making them a single-click solution. In fact, once you know this simple trick, you'll be able to create any number of single-click selection tools to put on your toolbar(s), making you much more efficient in your day-to-day editing.

Use SPI flash to boot the NB3000XN/AL with a combined image

The NanoBoard 3000XN and AL provide a number of options for auto-configuring the onboard FPGA:
The SPI Flash memory inside the Spartan 3AN (NB3000XN board only).
The two SPI Flash devices on the NanoBoard itself – the Embedded Flash and the Boot Flash.
There’s also a handy utility included in the Altium reference designs that makes it easy to create a combined hardware/firmware boot code, which can be applied to whichever Flash memory you use.

Create new components the smart way

The often laborious job of creating new library components eats into the time you could be spending creating great designs. And it’s particularly arduous when manually transfer ring component information from data sheets, or from another design tool.


Altium Designer offers a great, efficient way to bypass the normal painstaking method of bringing component object data into the design space from other applications – the Smart Grid Insert feature in the Library List panel.

Take a look at this video to see how to add component pins straight from a data sheet, and how Smart Grid Paste and Smart Grid Insert make creation of new components very fast and easy.

Connecting to Altium Designer with JTAG

Even though Nanoboards are ultra cool, many of our users also have other FPGA development boards as well as their own targeted full custom FPGA boards. Altium Designer is made to work with FPGAs in any of these situations.

If you have an FPGA development board, or your own FPGA board, as long as it uses a supported FPGA and a JTAG connector you can use it with Altium Designer.

Watch this video, and let me show you how to connect and configure your board and Altium Designer to work together for your FPGA development projects

Highlight complex net routes with Board Insight

Struggling to keep track of those important nets as you route your dense and complex board designs?

Why not put a few of Altium Designer's Board Insight features to work. Using them you can color and highlight specific nets in just the way that suits you.

Watch this video, and let me show you how.

Joining nets for Kelvin connections, RF parts and Planar Magnetics

Ground nets often need to be split up to control return currents and improve a product’s noise immunity and electromagnetic compatibility.

Sometimes figuring out how to make a controlled short circuit, impedance transformer, or planar inductor without violating design rules is painful, but it doesn't have to be. Net ties can be used to make it easy.

Watch this video, where I'll show you how they work.