-
- News
- Books
Featured Books
- design007 Magazine
Latest Issues
Current IssueLevel Up Your Design Skills
This month, our contributors discuss the PCB design classes available at IPC APEX EXPO 2024. As they explain, these courses cover everything from the basics of design through avoiding over-constraining high-speed boards, and so much more!
Opportunities and Challenges
In this issue, our expert contributors discuss the many opportunities and challenges in the PCB design community, and what can be done to grow the numbers of PCB designers—and design instructors.
Embedded Design Techniques
Our expert contributors provide the knowledge this month that designers need to be aware of to make intelligent, educated decisions about embedded design. Many design and manufacturing hurdles can trip up designers who are new to this technology.
- Articles
- Columns
Search Console
- Links
- Events
||| MENU - design007 Magazine
Altium ActiveRoute Debuts at PCB West: Routes Under One Second Per Connection
October 20, 2016 | Judy Warner, I-Connect007Estimated reading time: 8 minutes
While at PCB West in Santa Clara in mid-September, I had the chance to sit down with Charles Pfeil of Altium and learn more about their exciting new tool, ActiveRoute, that was introduced and demonstrated in their booth during PCB West 2016. I also learned a bit about Pfeil, who is a living history lesson in PCB design.
Judy Warner: Charles, nice to see you again. You have been very busy here at PCB West, doing hourly demonstrations of your new product, ActiveRoute, in the Altium booth. Please tell us a little bit about what you're demonstrating here at the show.
Charles Pfeil: ActiveRoute is a tool that helps designers do their interactive routing. It's not an automatic router, although it has very high levels of automation. The intent is to provide the designer with a way to interactively route, following all the rules, constraints, and restrictions, under their control so they can tell the routing technology where to route, what layer to route, and then they will route it very, very quickly. It generally routes in less than one second per connection.
Warner: What is the standard routing time?
Pfeil: I've actually run some tests and some competitions, and for the best designers, when we're talking about a 100–200 nets, the average is about one minute, and I'd say for the average designer it is closer to three minutes.
Warner: Impressive. So this speeds things up dramatically, up but still gives designers the control? I know with autorouting, designers lose some of that control, which they don’t like.
Pfeil: Exactly. Autorouting has a stigma, right? And rightly so [laughs]. The problem with autorouting is that it will put in way too many vias, and a typical statement I hear is, “It will take me more time to clean it up than if I had just routed it by myself in the beginning.” Although the autorouter itself would be very fast, the time it takes to clean it up and the pain to clean it up isn't worth it, so they'd rather route it interactively. This tool works as an interactive tool. You can take a small number of nets or a large number of nets, route them, and you have tools for guiding where it's supposed to be routed. The intent is to make the designer more productive, not just put it into a route engine and have it work on it for a while, and then give you back the results.
Warner: It sounds like it will speed up the design, keep the control, but give you the advantage of some of the speed of an autorouter.
Pfeil: The speed and the quality are really important. Designers like me are OCD, but quality is something that isn't just, "It looks pretty." It's about being efficient, and it's about, "I want the least number of segments, I don't want extra meandering, and I want it to be routed in groups. I want things spaced out at times." This is what quality is about. Sometimes quality is misinterpreted as pretty, but it's really about having efficient routing that is easy to edit in the future. The OCD part of us will make things symmetrical and evenly spaced, even when it's not necessary, but that's the way designers are. If you give a designer a tool to help with routing, they won't use it if they have to spend a lot of time cleaning up. Cleaning up means, “It didn't do what I would've done.” That's the hard part: producing the results in which a designer would say, "Yeah, that's good. I'm going to go to the next step. I don't have to adjust all these things."
Warner: Will this tool be an add-on or will it be integrated into Altium Designer?
Pfeil: It's included with Altium Designer. It's part of the base product.
Warner: Is that starting right now or on the next release?
Pfeil: It's starting with Release 17.0 which will be out before the end of this year.
Warner: Do you think that having this feature may help you sell more licenses?
Pfeil: In the end, it's the bottom line, right? It's one of many things that are new in 17.0. We did a lot of work on making the user interface easier. Our Vault capability has been enhanced significantly. We're continuing to improve the tool in whatever ways we can. I've been focused on the routing side, and really trying to make a tool that designers will want to use and become more productive.
Warner: You've been giving demos every hour here. Tell us a little bit about the response from the designers that you've been talking with.
Page 1 of 2
Suggested Items
Flex Announces Upcoming Changes to Its Board of Directors
05/07/2024 | FlexFlex announced that consistent with its succession plan, Michael D. Capellas, non-executive Chair of the Board of Directors of Flex, has informed the Board of his decision not to stand for re-election to the Board at the company's 2024 Annual General Meeting of shareholders to be held on August 8, 2024. Mr. Capellas has served on the company's board for 10 years, including as Chair since 2017, during which time he played a key role in building Flex's reputation as a trusted global technology, supply chain and manufacturing solutions partner and driving the company's success.
Europlacer Presents New Range of iineo SMT Placement Machines.
05/01/2024 | EuroplacerFor more than 15 years, the Europlacer iineo placement machines have made their mark on the SMT industry with unique features and unrivalled flexibility. Today, Europlacer announces the launch of the second generation iineo.
Incap US Hosts Annual Food Drive
04/30/2024 | IncapIncap US recently concluded its annual food drive, a tradition aimed at supporting the Greater Washington County Food Bank. This year marked the fourth year of the initiative, and we couldn’t be prouder of the collective effort that was made to its success.
Scanfil Uses Employee Engagement Survey to Improve
04/30/2024 | ScanfilOnce a year Scanfil arranges Employee Engagement Survey (EES) in order to get valuable insight from its employees. In EES all employees are invited to share their opinion, bring ideas for improvements, and contribute to making Scanfil a better place to work.
epoxySet Introduces EO-20E – Versatile, Electrically Conductive Epoxy
04/29/2024 | epoxySetepoxySet produces EPOXIOHM EO-20E an industry established, reliable electrically conductive epoxy designed for solder replacement, chip bonding and other intricate electronic and optoelectronic assemblies. This creamy paste has a an easy to use 1:1 mix ratio with a 48 hour work time.