Altium has many customers using Altium’s tools to help overcome their design challenges. Altium’s tools support a unified design approach, bringing together many aspects of designing electronics, with a high-integrity design-data management platform.

Altium is currently in the process of developing the methodology that they believe will harness the new generation of Altium Designer. They call this “Vault-Driven Electronics Design”. This methodology represents a work-flow and approach centered around Altium Vaults that will help design engineers using Altium software and systems to develop better electronics more efficiently and of a higher quality. It requires the right tools (Altium Designer, Altium Vault Technology, Version Control systems) and the right design process and practices (Design for Reuse, Re-factoring existing design data).

Find out more about Altium Designer, Altium’s development of Vault-Driven Electronics Design and Designing with Altium by watching the video series below.

Video#11 – Design Starts and Revisions

Today’s electronic products are designed and manufactured in a world where the collective members of the overall ‘product team’ – the design team, the manufacturing team and all others involved in the process of getting a product from thought to reality – are often dispersed around the globe. Efficient access to manufacturing data can give an unparalleled advantage.

Video#10 – Controlling Data Access for Fabrication and Assembly

Today’s electronic products are designed and manufactured in a world where the collective members of the overall ‘product team’ – the design team, the manufacturing team and all others involved in the process of getting a product from thought to reality – are often dispersed around the globe. Efficient access to manufacturing data can give an unparalleled advantage.

Video #9 – Managing Vault Users and Permissions

Video #8 – Configuring and Releasing Designs

Once a design is considered ready for flight into the wider world, it needs to be released. Accommodating this, Altium Designer provides powerful, high-integrity board design release management, as part of Altium’s wider Design Data Management System.

Video #7 – Designing Schematic Sheets for Reuse

Part 1: Introduction and Managed Sheet Style Guidelines

At some stage, the concept of designing for reuse has to increase in its abstraction. If we simply stopped at the component level, then each design that featured a similar piece of functionality – such as a USB interface, or voltage regulator – would be ‘reinventing the wheel’ as it were. And that’s where Managed Sheets come into play – schematic sheets designed to offer specific circuit functionality. Designed to the highest quality and for optimal reusability, these sheets are released to, and managed within an Altium Vault. Their use removes the risks associated with the traditional copy-and-paste approach. And they eliminate the repetition of design effort while adding to the level of design content that can be reused in future designs.

Part 2: Managed Sheet Design Principles

When it comes to the design of a managed sheet, the application of tuned standards not only aid in readability of the sheet, but bring a strong level of design consistency and uniformity. So not only a consistency presentation-wise, but also adherence to certain best-practice design principles.

Part 3: Releasing and Using Managed Sheets

Having captured a functional sub-circuit on a schematic sheet, in accordance with defined presentation styles and design principles, that sheet must now be released into the Altium Vault. Once released, it will enjoy the revision and lifecycle management benefits provided by the vault, and be ready for placement in future designs that require its functionality.

Video #6 – Building Models and Components for Reuse

Part 1: Building and Releasing Reusable Schematic Symbols

A vault-based component references various models that are used to represent that component across different design domains. For board-level components, there will typically be two such models – a schematic symbol and a PCB 2D/3D model. With a vast range of components released to a vault, there are always going to be cases where components from different vendors offer the same functionality. In such cases, the footprint may be different and specific to the vendor, but the symbol used to represent these components may be identical, a common denominator that highlights a level of genericness.

Part 2: Building and Releasing Reusable PCB Component Models

Generally, each of the component manufacturers have their own specific, well defined PCB component model packages, that adhere to strict industry standards. So, for the most part, these are used. But even manufacturer-specific footprints are reusable across many devices from each manufacturer.

Part 3: Building and Releasing Managed Components

With all prerequisite models created and released into a vault, a design component can be defined and released. Components are formally modeled as file-based definitions that can be released into a vault for reuse in a design project. Revision-controlled and lifecycle-managed, a company can authorize the ‘set’ of components that can be formally used by their designers.

Part 4: Revision Schemes

It’s one thing to have suitable names and design standards which make it easy to find and re-use items from the Vault, but revisions are also needed, to trace changes to items, and ensure that the most recent or appropriate version of an item is being used in the design. Altium Designer and the Altium Vault offer customizable revision schemes for this very purpose.

Video #5 – Naming Conventions, Revision Schemes and Design Standards

Part 1: Vault Folder Structure

An important part of any good design methodology is having well-organized and easily accessible data. From the lowest level symbols and footprints, all the way to complete released designs ready for production, users have to be able to quickly and easily find and use those items, with accurate knowledge of their status. With the Altium Vault’s search capability, design item lifecycle management and reuse, having the right naming conventions, revision schemes, and design standards will greatly improve design efficiency over time.

Part 2: Item Naming Conventions and Folder Presets

When searching for a particular component in a Vault, a designer might typically base their search on some functional aspect of that device, or perhaps the manufacturer’s part number if they already know which device it is they want to use in their design. It is important to have naming conventions for managed content which elegantly facilitate such searching, while also ensuring a meaningful, unique and traceable ID for each item.

Part 3: Design Standards for Source file names, Comments & Descriptions

In addition to the Item ID, each item released to the Vault also has Comment and Description text fields which, in order to be useful, must contain well-defined textual information about those items. These fields are populated based on naming applied to source design elements on the design side.

Video #4 – Using Templates and Linked Output Jobs

An important part of Altium’s design methodology is the ability for a designer to get going on a new design quickly, and in a streamlined way. To support this, the idea of using templates and common files naturally evolved. This involves templating as much of the design-side source as possible, giving a designer all the bits and pieces they need to get started with that next big design.

Video #3 – Setting up with Version Control

Version control and Altium Vault Technology are essentially symbiotic partners in the design ‘dance’. While Vaults offer a secure repository for the released data, and are the source from which all elements in a new design project are placed, it is a version control repository – or Design Repository – that stores the design-side source itself, the source that gets incrementally changed by a design team on a day-by-day basis, and released (and re-released) into a vault as a series of evolutionary revisions of linked design items.

Video #2 – Getting Started 

Altium’s Vault-Driven Electronics approach is built on the assertion that higher level design blocks can only ever be as good as the design elements used to create them. So whether it’s a single sub-circuit, an entire schematic sheet, a PCB layout, or even a released design, the quality of the design output will be entirely dependent on the quality of the lower level building blocks; get the building blocks right, and you’ve set yourself up for success at the product level. Overlook the building blocks and invariably it’ll come back to bite you at the most inopportune time.

Video #1 – Introduction

In this video you will listen to Matt Berggren, Manager of Altium’s Shanghai Hardware Design group, share his views and provide a look into how he and his team are working with Altium’s software team to define an approach to using these capabilities in a practical, real-world situation. Matt talks about high-integrity data management, and how these capabilities can help you streamline your design process today, as well as providing a look into how today’s design system provides the ideal foundation for the future!