70 Silicon chip Australia’s electronics magazine siliconchip.com.au
“Hands on” review by Tim Blythman
Altium Designer 19 is the latest incarnation of the PCB design software
that we’ve been using at SILICON CHIP, in one form or another, for over
20 years. While the changes are more evolutionary than revolutionary
(compared to the big step that was Altium Designer 18), there are
definitely some great new features to discover.
I
t’s now 2019, and that means that Altium Designer 19
is available. If you were on the ball, you might have
even noticed that it was released in mid-December last
year, less than a year after Altium Designer 18.
You can see our comprehensive review of Altium Design-
er 18 in the August 2018 issue of SILICON CHIP (siliconchip.
com.au/Article/11189).
Altium Designer 19 is the latest generation of EDA (elec-
tronic design automation) software that began over 30 years
ago as the Australian product, Protel PCB. Effectively a
tool for turning a circuit idea into a finished PCB, Altium
Designer is the tool we use at SILICON CHIP to design PCBs
for all our projects.
We’ve now been using Altium Designer 19 for around
a month and are quite happy with the improvements we
have seen in that time.
Installation
AD19 is a 1.9GB download which uses up about 4.9GB
of storage space after installation. To install it, you first
download a small (~20MB) program which then down-
loads and installs the rest by itself.
There was an option to transfer our settings from a pre-
vious version of Altium Designer, which we took, and it
did transfer all our settings across, although it didn’t bring
over our recently used documents list.
This review is of version 19.0.10, which was the latest
version available at the time of testing. Altium usually re-
leases a few updates to each major version of Designer over
the year, presumably to fix bugs that were reported or dis-
covered during that time.Component re-route feature
This is one of the new features that many people are sure
to make good use of. In practice, it’s certainly not perfect,
but it’s worth using.
The situation is this: you have placed and routed a small
group of components, perhaps an IC and its associated pas-
sives, but then you realise that the entire group needs to
be moved for whatever reason.
Previously, you would have to do a fair bit of track rerout-
ing. At the very least, you would move the group of primi-
tives, including the parts and their interconnecting tracks,
and then try to fix up the now mangled external connect-
ing tracks, getting them to where they need to go without
short circuits or clearance violations. In the worst case,