Routing the PCB

Working in harmony with component placement, routing is a key factor in the success of your PCB design. Altium Designer includes a number of intuitive interactive routing features to help you efficiently and accurately route your board, from a simple double-sided board, all the way through to a high density, high speed, rigid-flex, multi-layer board.

Altium Designer has a number of interactive routing capabilities, including:

• The interactive routing tool. Interactive routing is fast and efficient, with walkaround, hug and push, and push modes that let you get the job done quickly and efficiently.

• There is full support for differential pair routing, as well as single-sided and differential pair length tuning.

• You also might like to explore ActiveRoute, an automated interactive routing technology that delivers efficient multi-net routing algorithms, applied to the specific nets or connections that you select. ActiveRoute also allows you to interactively define a route path or Guide, which then defines the river along which the new routes will flow.

• The topological autorouter produces routes like that of a skilled board designer. Being a topological router, it is not constrained to an orthogonal grid, instead being guided by preferred direction settings and connection paths.