Altium Designer

Naja - es gibt bessere Software

Kommentare: Gute Software mit Handhabungsmängeln und nicht erreichbarem Support. Nur für Anwender geeignet die einigermaßen gut mit der englischen Sprache vertraut sind.

Vorteile:

Altium Designer ist recht umfangreich und man kann sehr viel damit machen. 3D und Anbindung an Solid Works sind sehr gut. Wenn man sich eingearbeitet hat (dazu braucht man Zeit und Nerven und man sollte sich diese auch nehmen) kommt man recht zügig vorwärts. Mit Tasturkürzeln zu arbeiten sollte man sich angewöhnen sonst macht es keinen Spaß.

Nachteile:

Support ist grauenhaft da dieser fast nicht erreichbar ist. Man kann sich 1000 Videos ansehen die alle das Thema tangieren wenn man viel Zeit hat, dann findet man auch eine Lösung. Wenn man den Support (Hartnäckigkeit ist gefordert) dann doch mal erreicht, dann ist der sehr kompetent. Einen deutschen Support zu bekommen ist noch interessanter, geschweige denn eine brauchbare Anleitung oder gar ein Menü in Deutsch. Das sollte für eine moderne Software eigentlich kein Problem mehr darstellen. Konstruktionen mit komplexen Geometrien macht man besser in anderer Software. Ich vermisse die Funktionalität von CAD Werkzeugen. Bei Altium wird die einfache Handhabung ohne Kommandozeile angepriesen. Die angebliche Benutzerfreundlichkeit über Bildschirmmenüs erschließt sich mir aber nicht wirklich. Auf ein Minium reduziert sind die Menüs, dafür darf man dann aber in Untermenüs suchen die sich durchaus von Version zu Version unterscheiden können. Handbücher werden dann schnell obsolet.

The industry standard for electronics design

Kommentare: Great, we could not create such good products without this tool.

Vorteile:

Altium Designer has become the industry standard for electronics design. The feature set and rate of improvement are impressive.

Nachteile:

The product is very expensive and sometimes unstable. The stability has improved over the years.

KKR75's review

Kommentare: Using it every day, and would never consider any other alternative

Vorteile:

The GUI ease of use, the software depth, breadth, and features

Nachteile:

The fact that some readily available extensions, like PDN and SI Analyzer by Keysight, are NOT available to standard (perpetual license) customers like me. This should be DEFAULT !!!!!

If they can solve tech support responsiveness issues, this is a great tool

Kommentare: All good except tech support is slower than I've ever experienced.

Vorteile:

Industry acceptance, good integration, active BOM feature

Nachteile:

Tech support responsiveness has been abysmal

After my first six months of AD

Kommentare: Once over the learning curve, it's not bad. Everyone will have their opinions but at the end of the schematic and PCB tools are straightforward (usually) and nothing out of the ordinary from other tools out there.

Vorteile:

Variants and document generators. They just save so much headache of different versions and the documentation that goes with it. To have it all spit out at the click of a button is great.

Nachteile:

Lack of generic symbol libraries and having to build up your own libraries before you actually can get down to your design. For projects that don't have strict validation and supply chains, this forces a lot of up front decisions that aren't really necessary, like choosing which of 15 (or more) completely suitable capacitors you're going to commit to, and hope doesn't have supply issues or you get to choose again. The inconsistent mouse and keyboard shortcuts between the application and the Altium 365 web interface are occasionally infuriating. Make it the same please.

Greenwood, G

Kommentare: Learning curve is steep due so many features but the support is very good. I hope Altium continues to invest in the quality support.

Vorteile:

Cloud availability. Feature rich. Flexibility. Support.

Nachteile:

Learning curve. There is a lot to know about the layout of the tool, where things are, and how to find and use. Many items are not intuitively placed. The paid training is a ripoff. After, going through the courses I later found much of the same videos online. Altium should just make the training freely available to compensate for lack of intuitiveness. In a sense, the tutorials and training should be an investment Altium makes in its products. Also the tutorials need to be brought up to date.

Altium Designer - ATaggart Review

Vorteile:

Ease of design process Project management

Nachteile:

Takes a long time to load the program from startup

The standard for PCB CAD software

Kommentare: Overall phenomenal tool! As a small tech startup we don't have the resources and man power that a large company may have, yet Altium Designer has enabled us to move very quickly. We have designed a number of boards with great success.

Vorteile:

Altium Designer has set the standard for schematic capture, PCB layout and documentation generation. Coming from Mentor PADS has been such an eye opening experience. I would say the one thing I love about Altium Designer is the integrated component selection. It truly allows for a small team to move at a very rapid pace.

Nachteile:

I wish it had Power and Signal integrity simulation that Mentor HyperLynx offers. It would be wonderful to get feedback on power plane design and decoupling in one tool.

EE Manager

Vorteile:

The integration design environment, 3D view, Altium 365, releaser, design review and version control.

Nachteile:

The features are not intuitive enough for users to quickly adopt and use it.

Design with intelligence

Kommentare: Altium Designer is an intelligent and user-friendly PCB design platform that has enhanced my company's design capabilities tremendously. It was somewhat daunting to adopt it as a replacement for our outdated design software, but the payoff is ultimately worth the effort!

Vorteile:

Schematic driven routing and seamless switching between wire routing and via placement using rules-based design.

Nachteile:

The material library's inability to be customized to work with metals that fall outside of the standard library options.

Engineering manager review for Altium for PCB Design

Kommentare: Simple tool easy to learn and use ,we are using for PCB design its helping a lot

Vorteile:

E CAD Connectivity is good and integration with other software is good.

Nachteile:

it will take lot of time to understand some of the features.

Altium Designer Review from Admin perspective

Vorteile:

Its a pretty strong tool that's backwards compatible with solidworks and other programs. Even at a basic level, it's very strong and easy to use.

Nachteile:

When maintaining a company component library, its difficult to revert components back to a previous revision. This was a single case for us when a user began making random changes on components without notification to the team, causing layout problems. That made it difficult for a quick reversion back to the working components.

Altium Designer Value

Vorteile:

It includes quite a few tools in the package and so far has been meeting our needs for schematic and layout design.

Nachteile:

The third party simulation tools do not pickup the Altium constraints. They have to be redone in these tools and it is very time consuming.

Altium Designer ''Friend''

Kommentare: I started with Protel 99, after I switched to DXP and finally to Altium Designer. The most important value of Altium is the continuous improvement of the feature, tooling menu, visualiazation 3D, multiboard experience.

Vorteile:

Altium is very simple to learn, very performant tool, easy to use and very precise and fast routing. I like the 3D mode, new features added into 3D mode viasualization. Very easy to perform design rules check. Tool is quite stable and crash are very very few. It is good to work with git repository and A365.

Nachteile:

It is appreciated to add a PANEL FOR TESTPOINT management. We use a loto of ICT test point and the information in one side panel in real time is a VERY VERY important and accelerate the design of the boards.

A good tool for simple to complex tasks

Kommentare: My overall experience is very good; after some learning, you can be very proficient and the help system will help you to deal with things you still cannot do, making it very easy to learn new things.

Vorteile:

The best thing about Altium is that there is very tight interaction between schematics and layout tools. The communication between the two environments allows you to easily implement modifications one way or the other, thus applying changes very effectively. Furthermore, the online help system is very effective, providing you an answer to almost all your questions.

Nachteile:

There is room for improvement in track polishing, in the sense that too often pieces of tracks remain hidden underneath other tracks and make it more time consuming to clean up projects. I suggest a function which analyzes tracks and regenerates proper ones so that the outline of copper is maintained with the minimum number of elements.In addition, sometimes Altium does not seem to be able to understand at all what you are trying to do, both in schematics and in layout.

Easy to get into for new users, but with many powerful features to get into as needed

Kommentare: It used to be that Protel/AD was not very well established, so recruitment of experienced people wasn't easy. Now it's pretty much the industry standard, which is great. I look forward to using AD, and actively enjoy using it.

Vorteile:

Integration between schematic and PCB, MCAD integration and 3D, library management and online component data.

Nachteile:

The price! Apart from that there is little that I don't like.

Altium Designer review - PWR Racing Team

Vorteile:

Altium 365 is a very useful feature for development of a variety of projects as well as storage space. Version control is a great way to keep track of the product development.

Nachteile:

Rendering of the PCBs in 3D View would be an awesome feature to make great visualizations of the finished products. PCBs exported to CAD formats lack traces thus resulting in lacking result.

Altium - many pros and few cons

Vorteile:

The software is very easy to use and quick to learn the basics. The most useful feature is the manufacture part search. You can find components with footprints and their stock on sellers very easily. Also, keyboard shortcuts are very useful, especially when you start to get the hang of things, they can save you a lot of time

Nachteile:

Some of the features that I use most often (cross probe) does not have easy to use keyboard shortcuts. The price for the license is somewhat steep, but the user experience is better than other software

Very connected

Vorteile:

When adding component, often, footprint and schematic can be downloaded automatically from the web. The version management is nice, and I appreciate warnings that prevents to do things that may cause trouble (for instance when renaming a component before having saved the modification).

Nachteile:

I didn't found it easy to add component's footprint and schematic, from external lib file. (Import with snap Eda, and automatic download from the web are fine).

PCB layout made less difficult

Kommentare: I use Altium to layout (not simulate) PCB for both prototyping and production. The software does a great job simplifying line and via placement, including it's push features. The rule system is robust if often frustrating and can be very useful helping to catch various board requirements (think differential pair lengths). Overall I find Altium to be very useful and infinitely better than old school layout methods, but it can also be very frustrating with various features broken in updates.

Vorteile:

Altium simplifies PCB layout with a very useful set of features and easy customization of icons and hotkeys.

Nachteile:

Every update (and they come regularly) breaks something new. And once something you used to like finally gets fixed, something new will break. Also, how to add/change polygon pour vertices changes all the time and it drives me nuts.

Altium Designer for an Electronic and Telecommunication Engineering Undergraduate

Vorteile:

As an engineering undergraduate we have to design lots of printed circuit boards. When I am using Altium designer I could easily design foot print according to the component I chose to use. In altium designer we can easily import the changes we made on the schematic . If we did any changes on the PCB design layout which are not on the schematic those changes also can be export to the schematic. We can customize the design rules such as track width, pad sizes, clearance and etc as we needed. That will help us to have the perfect PCB. When its comes to routing, auto-routing option in the altium is perfect. We only need to adjust routing rules according to our work then altium will do the routing part. We can easily generate files that are need to print PCB for an example if need to generate gerber files we only need to go the option that let us create gerber files and select the required layers and formats.

Nachteile:

If you are new to PCB designing it will be little bit difficult to learn altium at the first place with the time we will get familiar to the altium designer. If you looking for footprint for free in online sources it will little bit difficult.

Altium Designer

Kommentare: Altium made my work easier and I have learnt a lot of ways and about features that can ease the work.

Vorteile:

Huge range of features, manage multiple projects at once, supports various plugins.

Nachteile:

Heavy usage of processor, require good graphics

Professional PCB designing tool

Kommentare: Have lot of features. Since most of the companies use Altium as their main PCB development tool finding footprints for more recent components is very easy. Support industrial standards. Supports cad files and generated cad files are compatible with Solidworks Cad tool.

Vorteile:

Great PCB designing tool with lot of features. Supports custom cad files and foot prints. Online and offline tools available for library conversions for PCB component. Support simulations and complex designs. The best thing is it can generate 3D cad file of the final PCB where it can be used to make the enclosures. More professional and customisable.

Nachteile:

It takes longer time for first start of the application, and consumes lot of processing power. Therefore it discourages simple edits in PCB.

Altium PCB design

Kommentare: Overall I have been satisfied but I think Altium's old model Protel was much better. I used to use that in 2003 and that was better than today's version.

Vorteile:

Altium has got a huge collection of libraries for PCBs. Almost all the parts which you can buy from Digikey or Mouser, their footprints are present in Altium. I have also been able to customize the footprints to my own needs. Infact, I have made some footprints all from scratch. That is a very powerful feature. Similarly when making the schematic, the 3D model of all the parts is also visible which helps alot in visualizing the part I am gonna use.

Nachteile:

The autorouting in Altium is completely broken. It takes multiple sessions to get completed and most of the time it stop at 90% with tens of vias. Sometimes even with a wire width of 200um and isolation distance of 150um, the autorouter finds it difficult to make a track for SMDs. Therefore, for a PCB with parts more than 200, it becomes almost impossible to make single sided PCB. Though it works OK for double sided PCB.

Altium Designer, top 3 pcb design tools

Kommentare: Altium Designer continues improving year after year. Still behind of representative on the pcb design end but far more beyond on the schematich side. Altium is by far easier to use and more intuitive that representative and I would recommend Altium to Engineers that want to design an schematic and do a layout without having to interact with different tools.

Vorteile:

How the menus look and how easy is to set up the rules for design.The shapes and keepouts definitions are year after year better and better.

Nachteile:

Still can find some bugs, and it crashes more than its competitors. Not being able to add the drill table on the ODB++ except you exported into another mechanical layer.