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Engineering, Architecture & Information Technology Instrumentation Support Group

Altium Designer Tutorial Notes
Revision: 1 Altium Version: Winter 2009 Introduction Altium Designer is a software package which allows electronic circuit designers to design, draw and simulate electronic circuit boards. Altium is a vastly complex software design suite and these notes are designed to introduce theuser to the fundamental principles and tools used throughout the package. These notes are designed to accompany the METR2800 tutorials provided by the University of Queensland and examples from that course are used to accurately describe certain tasks and processes. If you require any further details then please contact a member of the Instrumentation Support Group (Bd 45-103). Getting StartedOpening Altium Designer

Altium places its own shortcut into the Window’s Start Menu. The simplest way to start Altium is to open the Start Menu and click on this shortcut.

If no shortcut is available then the user should look in the ‘Programs’ menu to see if there is an Altium folder available. The Altium Designer Winter ‘09 shortcut should be available in this folder. Upon opening theprogram, the user will be presented with an opening window similar to the one below. This is the home page and is used to set up the design workspace.

Created by: Peter Bleakley 22/02/10 Document: TU-002-A Page 1 of 36

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The main portion in gray contains shortcuts to some of the more intricate parts of the AltiumDesigner Suite and will therefore not be explained in this section. The main area that needs to be explained is the white area on the left of the window. This is the Project Window and it is used to control the Design Workspace. If no Project Window is visible, go to the menu bar and click View>>Workspace Panels>>System>>Projects. This portion of the screen can have many windows open in it at onceand the user is able to navigate between them using tabs at the bottom of the space. This will become apparent as the tutorial becomes more advanced.

Created by: Peter Bleakley 22/02/10 Document: TU-002-A Page 2 of 36

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A) Setting up a Workspace and Project In Altium Designer Suite, all the programs are able tointeract and pass information between them. This makes designing a circuit board a lot less time consuming as the software does most of the work. In order for the software to work correctly, the user must first set up a design workspace. Imagine this area as the empty drawer of a filing cabinet ready to take all the files produced by the software. It will be divided up into many different‘Projects’, but the use of this word at this stage may be a little misleading. The design workspace will contain all the documents relating to a single design project that the user is working on. For each new electronic design project there will be a new design workspace. The user should follow the next few steps in order to set up a new PCB design workspace. 1. Save the design workspace with an appropriatename. - Click on the button in the project window labelled ‘Workspace’. This brings up a menu. Select ‘Save Design Workspace As…’ from the menu. Save the workspace to an appropriate folder on the computer.

2. Add a project to the workspace. - Below the ‘Workspace’ button in the Projects window is a button called ‘Project’. Click this button to open up the Project menu. From the menu select‘Add New Project>>PCB Project’. This task can also be performed from the ‘Workspace’ menu if desired.

Created by: Peter Bleakley 22/02/10 Document: TU-002-A Page 3 of 36

Engineering, Architecture & Information Technology Instrumentation Support Group

A Project icon will appear in the Projects window. The user is able to right-click on this icon to bring up a menu of functions. It is...