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.

Choose your own shortcuts

One of the best ways of improving your productivity is to learn and use the keyboard shortcuts in Altium Designer.

This Design Secret gives you tips on how to learn the existing shortcuts, and shows you an easy way of defining your own.

Check out the video, where we show you how it all works.

Managing those tricky non-electrical parts

Every design includes items that are non-electrical, and sometimes these are critical parts of the design.

If your design includes non-electrical components, such as logos, a heat sink or fiducials, and you’ve been wondering how to manage these types of components, take a look at this design secret to learn how it's done.

Watch the video, where I'll show you how Altium Designer has the all component property features you need to make it easy.

Add supplier search data to your component database!

In a recent blog entry, there are details of out a mini webinar showing you how to use the Supplier Search Panel in Altium Designer to add purchasing information directly to your schematics and BOM. If you missed out on that, click here.

So, Library Managers and Designers now know how easy it is to add supplier search information to component symbols on the schematic, but what if your company uses a SVN DBLib for component management? A few people have emailed me asking if this functionality is possible with Database-driven libraries (DBLib and SVNDBLib), and the good news is that it is!

Watch the video featured here, where I'll show you how easy it is to add supplier search links to a corporate component database.

Practical and easy design re-use with Device Sheets

Have you tried to implement design re-use in your company but found it too hard to manage? But it is possible, if you use Device Sheets.

Not only do Altium Designer’s Device Sheets let you easily share and re-use sections of your designs, there are also features to handle component and sheet level annotation on the re-used schematics.

Watch the video, where I'll show you how easy it is.

Refactoring new life into your designs

There are many situations where you want to revise a design to use newer technology, improve a portion of a circuit, modify its functionality or simply extend its life.

Altium Designer provides the ability to quickly and easily convert a section of a schematic into a new hierarchical block that maintains existing connectivity. We call this "refactoring" – a phrase from the software world, but it applies just as well to hardware design.

Watch the video, where I'll show you this neat trick, and where you will want to apply it in your own design flow.

Creating your own PCB panels for fabrication and assembly has a number of advantages

PCB panels are a standard part of the fabrication and assembly processes.


While you can let your fabricator create the panel, there are a number of advantages to doing yourself in Altium Designer, such as mixing boards on the panel and automatic panel updates when the source board design changes.

Watch the video, where I'll show you how easy it is to work with panels.

The fast, easy way to create 3D component bodies

Do you want to design your PCB in 3D, but can’t source STEP models for all the components?

You can create your own 3D component models in Altium Designer by building up simple 3D body objects. By knowing when it’s best to work in 2D or 3D, how to switch between those modes, and how to adjust the properties of the 3D Body objects, you’ll be quickly creating suitable 3D mechanical bodies in no time.

Watch the video, where I'll show you how easy it is.

Tackling your design documentation woes... - Mini Webinar

The path to consistent, simple, push-button design documentation

The topic in this mini-webinar is developing a process flow that can make design documentation woes a thing of the past.

In this webinar, the first in a series of discussions on process management, I'll discuss a range of techniques for taking the guesswork out of creating your design documentation.

We'll look at setting up a solid base of files to get everyone started out on the right foot. We'll look at ways to produce PCB fabrication and assembly notes faster and more consistently than you might have thought possible. Finally, we'll look at push-button output generation using output generators that really do take the guesswork out of publishing your fabrication and assembly documentation.

Live-linking schematic components to supplier data - Mini Webinar

The drudgery of sourcing the right parts for a design, or ensuring the parts available from the ‘company library’ are suitable, can leave you frazzled, dazed, and numb.

It may be easy to source the more obvious parts (ICs and major semiconductors) but it can still take hours or days for a purchasing officer to wade through the BOM in a feedback loop with the design team, looking for all the smaller, seemingly insignificant parts.

Altium Designer solves this problem by providing built-in ability to link component data sheets and reference information right in the schematic symbols. It has a unique and powerful supplier search tool that, once you've found the components you need, gives you the ability to directly call up the order codes, pricing and even supply multiples, right in the BOM and other reports.

Searching for the right parts should be quick and easy - now it is!

Customising Altium Designer - Mini Webinar

Altium Designer provides unprecedented interface flexibility, enabling you to reorganize and restructure the user interface in ways never before possible.In this webinar, learn how to shuffle things around, reorganizing menu and toolbars. See how to create custom keyboard shortcuts, and create whole menus and toolbars. You’ll also learn how Altium's powerful scripting system can be used to create everything from simple automations, to rich GUI-driven application components that even interface to other applications.So, take control of your design tools! And prepare to be blown away by a litany of tips and tricks that help you configure Altium Designer to the way you want to work. We promise you will NOT be disappointed!