Dear Engineers,

I spent a fair amount of my time where I used to work evaluating future engineering tools and methodologies that would help me and my development team work more synchroneously, more efficiently and in a way that would make design more fun. We engineers are a odd bunch, we love to solve problems but if the tool we used would do what we needed them to do then even the better.

Altium Designer empowers you with the ability to not only do your schematic capture, create your own components with ease or use those from an extensive, regularily updated library, but also with the ability to make finite tweaking using mixed simulation, along with impressive PCB layout and routing technologies. As if that wasn't enough you can also export the whole design to an MCAD tool such as Solidworks.

A third dimension, how cool is that? So this means that I can define a third dimension onto my PCB footprint and then check to see how the whole thing looks like before I even have anything near to the real thing infront of me.

It also means that the Mechanical dude can design his housing to fit my board more easily, or the other way around I can import his "in progress" design with a self updating link into my ECAD tool and mate it up with my board.

Well I just thought I'd share the link that inspired me ...

http://www.nextgenerationelectronicsdesign.com/

Lars