We're excited to announce the beta test of our new Design Review application for Altium 365, is now available for everyone to test. This new application accelerates your design reviews, tracks everyone’s feedback in real time, and prevents errors for higher-quality products.
We're thrilled to announce the launch of Jira Integration for Altium 365, now available to all users. This powerful integration bridges the gap between electronics design and project management, streamlining workflows for engineering teams.
Introducing Requirements & Systems Portal in Altium 365
We are excited to announce that the Requirements & Systems Portal application has launched into the Altium 365 cloud platform for electronics design collaboration.
We’re thrilled to inform you about the latest updates to the Altium 365 BOM Portal, which includes the ability to manage and optimize multiple BOMs, visibility into parts usage, and autofill of alternate parts. These new features and improvements are designed to make your BOM management even more efficient, helping you streamline purchasing, reduce costs, and mitigate supply chain risks.
Secure Collaboration with the NEW Organizational Security Package
We are excited to release a new Secure Collaboration tool, Altium 365 Organizational Security Package. A new package designed to give your IT security team advanced access controls and compliance tools to safeguard your data, while giving your design teams intuitive tools to manage your projects and teams.
Enhancing Security Event Management with Altium 365 and SIEM Integration
Integrate your Altium 365 Workspace with an SIEM system using the SIEM API to capture and correlate security events, minimizing manual tasks and enhancing efficiency.
IP Whitelisting is a critical security feature that restricts inbound traffic to specified IP addresses, minimizing the risk of unauthorized access and enhancing access control. This update introduces Altium 365 users to the benefits and functionality of IP Whitelisting, empowering them to strengthen their network security and safeguard sensitive data effectively.
Once your BOM is scrubbed, you must go to each supplier and purchase your parts. BOM Portal introduces Octocart to simplify the way you manage your BOM procurement. Generate shopping carts for supported suppliers directly within BOM Portal, accelerating your procurement process and ensuring you get your parts directly from trusted suppliers.
Custom Parts Provider Pricing: Altium 365 BOM Portal
Strong supplier relationships are key to long-term business growth. This month, we focused on enabling deeper relationships with our customers and suppliers with Altium 365*. Now you can easily configure and view Custom Parts Provider Pricing for any BOM to scale your business and supplier relationships.
We are excited to unveil the Altium 365 BOM Portal, a new application designed to help engineers and procurement professionals reduce costly design respins and improve time to market with unmatched part data insights and collaboration features for all your electronic BOMs.
SiliconExpert Integration: Admin Settings and Parameter Categories
The SiliconExpert integration opens access to many critical part properties; however, not all properties might be useful for every company. To help you focus on your key data points, we introduced the capability to control the default list of SiliconExpert properties that are visible in Altium tools. So when you request SiliconExpert information for specific parts, we will show only a specific dataset for each part. You can change these settings anytime and additional data will be available in the tool without additional quota usage if you already requested data for that part.
Altium 365 Assembly Assistant: Available Now in the Altium Store
Happy New Year! 🎉 We are thrilled to announce that the Altium 365 Assembly Assistant is now officially released and available for direct purchase through the Altium Store.
Project Visualization Shortcuts in Altium 365 Web Viewer
Altium 365 Web Viewer introduces a suite of new visualization shortcuts and features, enhancing the user experience for rigid-flex and standard design projects. These productivity improvements significantly enhance the design and review process, offering more intuitive and efficient ways to navigate and visualize electronic designs.
This November, we introduced the Harness Wiring Component as the first step to reduce the need for third-party harness tools. This month, we present Altium 365 Web Viewer support for Harness Design Documents establishing a comprehensive, interactive browser environment for harness design collaboration with no tool installation or maintenance. All project stakeholders have a single space to review, inspect, and comment on the documents of harness and PCB designs (single and multi-board). Now team members can communicate design intent more effectively and reduce misunderstandings and delays.
Support for non-CAD design files enriches collaboration by enabling online access to a complete set of project files, streamlining communication and decision-making, and making design reviews more comprehensive and efficient.
We're pleased to introduce the Harness Wiring Component, a new feature designed to simplify and streamline the harness design process within Altium 365. This practical addition enables engineers to create and manage harness-specific components directly within the Altium 365 Workspace Library, including wires and cables.
Altium 365 Workspace users can now upload, view, share, and collaborate on Gerber and ODB++ files. This new feature is in open beta and available for all Altium 365 Workspace plans.
Altium MCAD CoDesigner 3.5.0: New Features and Enhancements
The latest version of Altium MCAD CoDesigner is here! The 3.5.0 version of Altium MCAD CoDesigner brings several new features and enhancements, including:
Altium is excited to announce our new integration of SiliconExpert into Altium 365! This integration provides access to a wealth of component data directly within the Altium 365 WebViewer, the Manufacturer Part Search, and your ActiveBOM, enhancing your design process and decision-making capabilities.
Altium has achieved CMMC Level 1 self-assessment, demonstrating our commitment to security. Users benefit from enhanced data protection, trusted relationships, access to SPRS scores, and CMMC 2.0 compliance. Organizations can leverage Altium 365 GovCloud to satisfy CMMC 2.0 requirements.
Altium 365 Web Viewer's Multi-board Schematic (MBS) and Assembly (MBA)
We are pleased to introduce the Altium 365 Multi-board Design View, which supports viewing Multi-board Schematic (MBS) and Assembly (MBA) documents directly within the browser.
Altium 365 has introduced a new update that improves visibility and project management for external users. This update introduces the concept of "Guests" to identify and differentiate external users from workspace members.
Your feedback matters to us, and we've been closely listening to your concerns about scheduled maintenance causing inconveniences when you have critical, last-minute changes to make before a deadline. We've taken decisive action to ensure a seamless experience on Altium 365.
We are thrilled to announce a new feature in Altium 365 that empowers non-admin users to create invitation requests for new users to join the workspace. Previously, only workspace administrators could invite new users, limiting the flexibility to bring in additional workspace members.
New Forrester Study: The Total Economic Impact™ of Altium 365
We're excited to announce the results of a study conducted by Forrester Research Consulting on the impact of the Altium 365® cloud-based electronics design collaboration platform. The findings reveal substantial significant efficiencies and effectiveness gains realized by organizations worldwide, establishing Altium 365 as a trusted platform that saves engineers hundreds of hours annually.
We are pleased to announce that Altium 365 has achieved SOC 2 Type 2 certification, demonstrating our dedication to upholding the highest standards of security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy.
We are thrilled to introduce the Altium 365 Contractor Portal, an exciting new platform designed to connect you with trusted partners who are experts in electronic design and Altium 365. This portal offers you a secure and efficient space to connect with professionals specializing in Altium 365.
The new PLM Integration Configurator is a useful tool for product development teams using Altium 365. This tool allows users to configure and customize their PLM integration to best fit their team's needs.
Dictionaries (Allowed Values for Component Properties)
The Dictionaries feature is a real game-changer for maintaining the quality of your component library and minimizing errors and duplicates in parameter values. This feature promotes consistency and accuracy throughout the design process by establishing a set of allowed values for parameters.
Altium 365 Web Viewer now displays reports on Design Rule Checking (DRC) and Electrical Rule Checking (ERC) for your project, which makes reviewing easier as you can check for rule errors or violations without opening the design in Altium Designer.
The newest release of MCAD CoDesigner 3.4.0 is finally here, and it comes packed with amazing features and improvements that will change how you work. With MCAD CoDesigner 3.4.0, you can connect native ECAD and MCAD design components to Siemens NX. This allows both engineers to work simultaneously on their respective components, which saves time and enhances collaboration.
Participating in the United States defense supply chain, aerospace, energy, and telecommunications industries requires compliance with regulatory requirements such as ITAR and EAR. Altium 365 GovCloud can help organizations manage regulated product development, meet flow-down requirements as contractors and suppliers, maintain strict control over access to their intellectual property (IP), and reduce IT overhead.
Our primary objective is maintaining consistency in the project view between Altium Designer and Altium 365 Web Viewer. In the past, the default Altium Designer preferences used in the Altium 365 Web Viewer created discrepancies when non-default preferences were employed, leading to incorrect design displays during design reviews.
Multiple PCBs and Panels Support in Altium 365 Web Viewer
We are delighted to announce the release of a new feature that allows you to view multiple PCB documents in your project, including panel PCBs. This feature streamlines your design process, enabling you to access and collaborate on your entire PCB design in one central location.
Exciting news for Altium 365 users! The platform has enhanced its compare capabilities by adding PCB Compare operations between different commits/releases of managed projects. This latest feature, which complements Altium 365's existing compare capabilities for schematic, BOM, and Gerber files, provides users with comprehensive tools for reviewing and analyzing design changes.
Altium Designer now offers the added capability to share project history reports with third-party entities in PDF format, while enabling users to save them as release artifacts for backup and internal auditing purposes.
Altium 365 Component Management provides the Part Choices functionality that shows supply information about the part you are interested in, including manufacturing lifecycle state, inventory, availability, and pricing.
The standalone Altium 365 Viewer provides free access to view and share your electronic designs and CAM (computer-aided manufacturing) data through your web browser. No downloads, no installations, and no registration are required.
With the latest update to task assignment notifications, project-level and workspace-level tasks will send notifications when events are assigned, or a user is mentioned in a task’s comment. The notifications ensure that people are notified and fully engaged even when they are not actively working on a given project.
Several tools have been used to run simulations based on your schematic and PCB layouts. When you run the simulations, you likely need to store the results where any team member can easily find them. The file sizes can vary depending on the simulation type, from small documents to massive binary files.
Preserving Contextual Comments in Layers in Altium 365
In Altium 365, you can add contextual comments to the entire project, including schematics, PCB design, bill of materials (BOM), and Gerber files. To see this comment in a schematic, for example, just go to a specific sheet and zoom in on a specific place where the comment is.
When there are transitions of roles and responsibilities in your organization or other changes in the business, you may need to transfer ownership of a workspace or objects within it.
We are excited to announce four more productivity feature improvements in Altium 365 Web Viewer: Preserve View, Object Visibility, Net Selection, and Additional Keyboard Shortcuts.
The Assembly Assistant helps reduce the time and increase the accuracy of the manual assembly of printed-circuit boards (prototypes or short runs). Engineers no longer need to flip through paper printouts or navigate CAD software while working on board assembly.
Compare Gerber Files with Altium 365 Standalone Viewer
The standalone Altium 365 Gerber Comparison viewer is a tool that allows you to graphically view the differences between various Gerber fabrication files through your web browser. It offers a quick and easy solution for checking a PCB design's fabrication output between release iterations or before sending your board production data to a manufacturer.
Altium 365 Web Viewer - Productivity Features Updates
In August 2022, we introduced you to net selection improvements in schematics with interactive navigation. As part of our ongoing initiative to enhance net selection, we have enabled you to instantly see and navigate a schematic containing a selected net thanks to a newly added zoom/selection feature.
When you select a net, you can zoom in and out of it, and your zoom is maintained even if you switch over to another document and then return. That way, you don't have to search for the net again.
As we mentioned in a post in June, we have been working on adding more file comparison capabilities to Altium 365. In addition to the existing BOM Compare function, we have added a BOM Compare for local changes.
With the introduction of reusable blocks, you can build reusable circuits (with both logical and physical parts) that are validated only once and can be easily integrated into your projects in Altium Designer. It's much easier to organize storage and find blocks to reuse in your Altium 365 workspace rather than finding and copying and pasting some circuitry from existing designs.
Altium 365 allows users to tag specific points in a project's history. Tags help to navigate the project history and identify meaningful versions (such as design stage, review, and revision), see changes made in that version, open it for viewing, and share the link with others.
The Library Health dashboard allows you to quickly identify parts in your library that have issues (including lifecycle issues for the parts and technical issues with data collection—e.g., invalid data, required fields with no values, undefined or duplicated parts, and other issues).
Actionable Version Control System (VCS) Status in Altium Designer
By implementing actionable VCS status icons in Altium Designer, we provide a user interface exactly where you expect it. This makes VCS-specific actions light and easy to use, reducing the time required to perform them.
For example, if you face conflicting changes, you can simply click on the file status and see possible actions.
Commenting in a Bill of Materials (BOM) in Altium 365
There are many potential issues that can impact and cause delays for supply chains, such as fluctuating availability of components, hold-ups in customs, spikes in demand, and supply issues. Commenting in BOM was created to facilitate communication among stakeholders and users.
When multiple users edit the same 'soft-locked' document that is part of a Workspace project, an associated conflict status icon appears in the Projects panel. Now, the conflict status icons provided by the soft-locking functionality are actionable. You can click the icon to resolve the conflict by reverting your edits.
Altium has released a new simplified login for the web and registration user interface. You can still use direct or social login or Single Sign-On (SSO; if configured for your organization), but now in a more simplified and connected way.
Sign in now at https://365.altium.com/. Everything Altium in one account.
When working on a new schematic, it can be challenging to pick the right components. You have to consider availability, cost, and various parametric requirements. What if you could place a component to complete your design and quickly replace it when ready for layout?
Ability to Compare Local Changes to Conflicted Files
In Soft Locks [Conflict Prevention] in Altium 365, we discussed how you deal with file conflicts. We have updated the functionality to offer the possibility to compare the changes between the local version of the conflicted file and the one on the server.
Many products include multiple interconnected printed circuit boards. In the 3D environment, the various system boards can be brought together within an enclosure using multi-board assembly in Altium Designer. Any required changes can be made at the 3D system level to verify that all connectors are aligned correctly, and that physical conflicts have been resolved.
Default Server Folder for Altium 365 Enterprise Workflows
Define the default project folder path depending on teams, board functions, or product lines; e.g., create one project workflow with Projects/Lighting as the default folder, another with Projects/Audio as the default folder, and a third with Projects/Others as the default folder.
Altium 365 has moved from a 32-bit service architecture to a 64-bit version. This update improves the speed, stability, and performance of Altium 365 cloud storage and version control capabilities, which will be particularly noticeable to users with big repositories and those who store large files on the platform.
It is important to validate proposed modification actions before executing them. Therefore, before committing, storing, or sharing the modifications with the team, you must ensure that no changes to the project are unexpected, no omission happened and only expected changes have occurred.
Altium recently released version 2.10.0 of the MCAD CoDesigner. MCAD CoDesigner now supports Teamcenter PLM when performing operations with PCB Assembly, PCB Part, and Components in Siemens NX. A new Advanced Geometry button has been added to the Fusion 360 Altium CoDesigner ribbon to simplify the working process for the copper and silkscreen layers. CircuitMaker can now also connect to Autodesk Fusion 360 through Altium CoDesigner.
Conflicts can occur when multiple people work on the same project simultaneously. The user might not realize that they are not looking at the latest version of the documentation (as it was already modified by someone else), leading to problems later.
The ActiveBOM is a powerful Altium Designer tool that provides real-time insight into the parts you need for your designs. It supports “early and often” monitoring to prevent manufacturing delays and setbacks.
Altium has just released version 2.9.0 of the MCAD CoDesigner. This version has the option to exclude small components when transferring from ECAD to MCAD. The arc behavior was improved, and the support for splines in board shape and cutouts was added. Now you can select a specific SOLIDWORKS configuration of a part on the board. We also introduced several improvements for Siemens NX.
With Altium 365, you can grant permission to teams or users based on the specific needs of a project. We have expanded Altium 365’s file-sharing setting, giving you more granular control over who can download source files and reshare projects with others.
The new 2.8.0 version of MCAD CoDesigner is out. MCAD CoDesigner now supports using a proxy with authentication in MCAD. PCB grid dots are no longer drawn for the "MCAD Coordinates" grid; this resolves the issue in which grid dots created difficulties with snapping on the PCB. This version also fixes a micro-deviation in coordinates that could occur when millimeter units were chosen on either the ECAD or the MCAD side. MCAD CoDesigner now supports the following symbols in the PCB filename: comma (,), single quote ('), and plus (+).
The Tasks feature takes design collaboration in Altium 365 to the next level. With Tasks, you never lose important action items and easily obtain a high-level view of the state of your project, all without leaving your design environment.
Removed Connectivity and Footprint Changes in Schematic Compare
Previously, when connectivity was removed from a schematic, this change was not visually reflected when comparing two versions of the document in Altium 365.
Downloading the entire comment history in detail is sometimes necessary for historical, legal, or auditing purposes. Altium 365 enables the quick and easy export of the entire project's comment history as a single PDF file.
The Altium 365 Trust Center and Knowledge Base Are Now Live
The Altium 365 Trust Center provides detailed information on the steps we take to ensure the security and reliability of the Altium 365 cloud platform, as well as the measures we take to comply with regulatory requirements.
The Gerber Compare utility is beneficial when PCB designers need to confirm changes in Gerber files before fabrication (e.g., unintentional changes). The recent Altium 365 update includes an intuitive and easy-to-use Gerber comparison feature, allowing designers to reduce time to market while keeping everyone informed during the process and making changes to Gerber files visible before sending them to the manufacturer.
Sharing access to projects in an Altium 365 workspace can be restricted to preserve data privacy. In the past, users without sharing permissions needed to contact someone with sharing permissions and request access to others. To make this process more manageable but still preserve security properties, we've implemented “Requesting access to a project for someone else”.
The purpose of Schematic Compare is to provide a domain-aware comparison—that is, show essential modifications (like component, net, and connectivity changes or removal) and disregard secondary events (like moving a component that does not affect connectivity).
MCAD CoDesigner now displays the complete history of accepted and rejected changes, along with any comments the engineer has entered if a change is rejected.
With Altium 365 Interactive Commenting, your comments provide you instant access and complete visibility to any design changes, so your explanations are all in one place.
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