Altium Designer truly is a design system created to help you be at your best. Once you start to use Altium Designer’s schematic editor, you will see how intuitive it is to use enabling you to increase your productivity and reduce any chance of design errors. You will find that it is easy to open and work with the different tools on your design thanks to the similar interfaces of the unified design environment. This is due to Altium’s signature unified design environment which allows everything from the schematic to the layout, as well as all the tools between, to work together in unison. There are many ways that the power of Altium Designer can help you, and one of the first that you will notice is how all the tools work smoothly together. You can take those older designs and get to work on them right away. Altium Designer has the capabilities you need to translate your P-CAD designs and libraries, as well as many other design formats so that you don’t have to redesign old work. Altium Designer is built to leverage the power of your 64-bit multithreading system architecture giving you the maximum design performance possible. Just as P-CAD was groundbreaking when it was introduced, Altium Designer has been groundbreaking since its introduction and continues to lead the field with its regular updates and enhancements. Design Tools That Are Built on a Solid Foundation This aligns perfectly with Altium’s goal of putting Altium Designer, the most powerful and versatile software available into your hands so that you have the tools you need to design the challenging technologies of today and tomorrow.

P-CAD was created to give PCB designers powerful software on a personal computer without having to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on mainframe computers and custom workstations. The original goals of the creators of P-CAD actually align very nicely with the goals at Altium making this a perfect union of software. The question is where is P-CAD now, and the answer might surprise you because it’s right here as part of Altium Designer.Īfter different sales and acquisitions over the years, P-CAD eventually became part of the Altium family. It is not surprising at all to find companies that are still using their older copies of P-CAD to design printed circuit boards today. This PCAD PCB design tool quickly outgrew its competition and at one point had the record for the largest installed user base at that time. CAD software that will continue through the years.īack in 1982, an innovative new PCB design software CAD tool called P-CAD was introduced to the world.

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