Best Engineering Software for Altium Designer

Altium's PDN Analyzer tool integrates with Altium Designer. This allows you to easily troubleshoot issues such as insufficient or excessive copper or uncontrolled voltage drops. You can also detect marginal voltage at critical power points, copper islands or peninsulas, and other issues that could be present in your PCB power system. PDN is the power system for active circuits on printed circuit boards. This includes all interconnections between the voltage regulator module, the metallization pads and die on integrated devices that are used for supply and return power. The entire length of the power delivery network must meet the IC supply voltage limits. Validating your power budget accurately means taking into account the minimum and maximum device limits, worst case voltage drops, combined return-path currents, and other factors. PDN Analyzer will show you exactly where these problems are.

The speed at which your product goes to manufacturing will depend on how testable your design is. Unfortunately, testing at the physical stage can't catch common mistakes that can lead to costly delays. XJTAG®, DFT Assistant integrates directly into your Altium Designer unified designer environment, running Design For Tests (DFT) checks directly on the schematic diagram. You can easily confirm that the scan chains are connected to each JTAG enabled device in your design and that each signal has been correctly connected and terminated. XJTAG®, DFT Assistant checks your JTAG-enabled devices before you finalize your layout. XJTAG®, Chain Checker helps you identify common errors and alerts you early to avoid any potential problems that could affect JTAG testing.

JTAG Maps™, an intuitive Altium extension, allows engineers to quickly assess test possibilities provided by the JTAG devices in their design. Engineers used to spend hours manually highlighting boundary-scan nets in a design to determine coverage. Boundary scan device model files (BSDLs), which indicate exactly which pins can or cannot be controlled by JTAG/boundary scanning, are crucial to any JTAG/boundary scanner process. JTAG Maps is compatible with BSDL models, and has an 'assume scanner covered' option. Although most users will prefer to use the JTAG Maps Altium coverage report, it is possible import a more detailed picture. The data can be exported to JTAG ProVision for further analysis. A simple message file containing full fault-coverage information can then be read back into JTAG Maps for display/highlighting.

AllSpice accelerates your time to market. It allows modern revision control and collaboration for native digital designs. Transform those three-hour-long, in person, and difficult-to-schedule meetings to digital, asynchronous review sessions. Run your design reviews like a pull request. Automate your review packages. Automate your review packages by creating PCB, schematic, or BOM redlines that highlight your design changes. It's like a software diff but for circuits and not code. Never make the same mistake twice. To remind you and your team what to do next, create checklists and templates that automatically populate for new design reviews. Better design reviews are key to agile hardware development. You can submit design updates and get feedback by sharing them with others. Give people outside of your team, such as mechanical or firmware engineers, a browser view of your designs.

Electronic designs are becoming more complex, making them harder to detect errors. These errors can result in high costs and hundreds or hours of work. It is important to detect these errors early on in order to prevent damage. In many cases, these mistakes are only discovered during the testing phase or on the customer's premises. BQR CircuitHawk, a unique and powerful (patent-based) tool for electrical circuit stress analysis and design error detection is available. CircuitHawk detects errors in the design phase before layout and production. So, during the final verification, no errors in schematics, connectivity, or stress are detected. CircuitHawk reduces design cycles and the time to market. This saves money and improves corporate reputation. CircuitHawk integrates design error detection, thermal, MTBF, and service life predictions at the schematic level before PCB layout and manufacturing.