What do you like best about Altium Develop?
PCB layout process is especially smooth for me. It's hard to summarise such a complex process, but I will try to list a few processes which I find especially satysfying when using Altium ( I am using version 25)
- Amazing support for .step 3D bodies. Visualising the fit of components is extremely easy on tight boards. Never having to worry about having an "exceedingly complex" step file - the speed of rendering is great. Positioning even the most awkward 3D bodies is easy using the "snap points" feature.
- "Work guides" feature makes positioning pads within a footprint easier. For some reason, footprint drawings in the datasheets seem to be drawn by people who never had to create one. Why give dimensions to the edge of the pad, not the centre? Pads are always placed by the centre. Anyhow, work guides go a long way towards solving this issue, as it's easy to visually alight the edge of a newly placed pad to the work guide. Presto.
- Draftsman tool makes generating quality assembly drawings a breeze. It takes a few clicks, and it looks great. Get massive kudos from manufacturing colleages who are used to old-skool documentation generated from Gerber layers
- Routing is generally very smooth, including differential pairs. Push-and-shove is brilliant. xSignals are really valuable too for complex, impedance- and length-controlled designs.
- The repeatable output generation using Output jobs is a massive time saver. The degree of customisation of the output leaves not much to be desired
- Custom queiries in Design Rules allow almost infinite degree of precision when specifying pretty much every aspect of the design
- Powerful library model allows each company to find a level of complexity/simplicity of library organisation which suits their size and style of working, from simple file-based to database-based
There will be lost of other positives, these are just the ones which stand out. The quality of documentation is generally brilliant, which makes it fast and easy to upskill and become productive, fast. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
What do you dislike about Altium Develop?
It mostly "just works", however there are some small niggles (as with any products). The ones I specifially came across are:
- Sometimes the design rules don't seem to work quite right with custom queries. For example, trying to create a rule to ignore supposedly interfering components don't always work. Specifically, if one creates a "Component clearance" rule, "where the first object matches" X and "where the second matches" Y, and set the minimum vertical and horisontal clearances to 0, it's meant to be a canonical way of ignoring a collision. However, it's a guess whether the "collision" will actually be igonored - more often than not I find the rule just does not work unfortunately, even with the priority set right.
- Another example of seemingly awkward/unworkable rule seems trying to ignore an unconnected class of polygons. I have a design where I have a few unconnected (no net) polygons underneath the switching inductors to prevent magnetic field from coupling onto the rest of the place. Altium correctly marks them as an "un-routed net", however I've not found a way to create a rule under "un-routed net" category to ignore them. Further on that point, the same query, "InPolygonClass('L3_unconnected')" works in PCB filter but does not work in the rule dialog. More consistency would be great.
One can always waive the resulting violations, but that does not convey the design intent as well.
- My colleagues and I found that sometimes the track length calculation ignores small segments of the track on a certain layer. This is potentially a big problem when trying to precisely tune/match track length.
-Very occasionally, Altium hangs with a memory violation error or some such error. I guess it's mostly inevitable for a product of such complexity, but it's still a bug! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
