Altium 365

Altium 365^® is a cloud-based infrastructure platform that connects all the key stakeholders and disciplines, from mechanical designers to parts procurement, to fabrication and assembly. In other words, the Altium 365 Platform connects electronics design to the manufacturing floor.

Since it is cloud-based, there is nothing to install and no servers to configure. It’s just there with Altium Designer – or from a browser. The Altium Platform hosts a whole set of software-based services that run on Altium 365, each designed to simplify your design life and make it easy for everyone involved in the product creation process to collaborate. With Altium 365 you can securely share your current design progress with management, purchasing, an external contractor, or a potential manufacturer, in a way that is also easy for them – simplified, interactive collaboration for all involved. And it's an experience that doesn’t require you to change the tools you use every day, regardless of your discipline.

When hosted on the Altium Platform, finding verified parts, setting up, and using components is simple. No server installation required and convenience features such as part import tools and advanced BOM management get you up and running immediately. You quickly have access to reliable parts data that can be yours alone, or shared. And in combination with a structured Release to Manufacturing process, you can be confident in a bill of materials that can be manufactured now and in the future.

There are different levels of access to the Altium Platform and the collaborative services it provides, ranging from exploring design solutions through to enterprise-level multidisciplinary product development. These capabilities require registration with Altium and purchased access to Altium software and services. Functionality is experienced from within Altium Designer and through the Altium Platform’s browser interface.

See altium.com for the current platform-based solutions.

Depending on your purchased level of access to Altium software, the Altium Workspace can offer additional support for collaborative design across teams within a larger organization. Support for managed flows facilitates workflow-driven PCB design, guiding a company's designers through typical, everyday design processes such as requesting new parts, performing project-related activities (such as design reviews or publishing to a PLM), and creation of new projects. The greatest depth of support for synchronization of component data with your company's enterprise systems is also provided, with direct support for a variety of PLM systems.

Other access to the Altium Platform services includes:

• The Altium On-Prem Server – A local, self-managed solution for your connected Workspace, installed and managed by your own IT department.

• The standalone Altium 365 Viewer – A way to experience the Altium Platform for free, where you can view and share your electronic designs (for a time-limited duration) through your browser.

With the Altium Platform everyone has the freedom to securely work from anywhere and connect with anyone. Altium 365 creates seamless collaboration points across the PCB development process, making it a highly connected design experience. As an Altium Designer user, you do not have to change the way you work today to take advantage of the Altium Platform. It complements and extends what you already do, making the parts that are difficult (such as collaboration, sharing and being organized) easy as you work together across the domains of electronics design, mechanical design, manufacturing and parts.

Altium Workspace

An integral part of the Altium 365 cloud-based infrastructure platform, the Altium Workspace is a dedicated cloud-hosted server for all your managed content. It facilitates the seamless connectivity of, and the mechanics for moving data between, the design, manufacturing and supply domains. A Workspace enables interactive, browser-based ECAD data collaboration that connects ECAD designers, procurement and board fabricators and assemblers in a way that makes it easy for them to work together in ways that they could not before.

The system inherently integrates with Altium Designer to provide an elegant answer to the question of handling design data with secured integrity. The Workspace not only provides solid, secure storage of data, but also enables re-release of data as distinctly separate revisions – essentially tracking design changes over time, without overwriting any previously released data. It also caters for the lifecycle of the data to be managed, allowing people who need to use the data to quickly see what stage the data has reached in its 'life' and therefore what it can be safely used for.

The Workspace can accommodate all managed data including components, domain models, schematic sheets of circuitry and design templates. Indeed, you can even create and manage your entire design projects directly within the Workspace, with a CAD-centric management view that facilitates collaborative review and commenting of that design, along with inspection of its BOM and history. Through a dedicated Releases page you can view and navigate the released file data, inspect the BOM, and view and comment on the snapshot of the design itself; the source for that released data. A chosen release can also be shared – as a Manufacturing Package – directly with your manufacturer.

By furnishing a set of reusable design 'building blocks' within the Workspace you can embark on fresh projects safe in the knowledge that each model, component and higher-order design element has been ratified and approved for use, without having to reinvent the wheel as it were. The Workspace becomes both the source and destination of design elements, with each new design utilizing elements released to, and managed through, the Workspace. And by designing only with elements from the Workspace, the integrity of those designs is inherently assured.

Global Sharing of Data

One of the most powerful aspects of the Altium infrastructure platform is the support for collaboration on a global scale. At the heart of this is the platform's support for Global Sharing. With Altium 365 you can securely share your current design progress with management, or purchasing, or a potential manufacturer, in a way that is also easy for them – simple, interactive collaboration for all stakeholders.

Data can be shared with anyone, anywhere in the world. What you share and with whom is fully configurable and down to you, and can include:

• Sharing design data with members of your Workspace team. Manage the sharing projects, folders and items as required. With projects for example, you might share with read-only access to invite comments and feedback. Or perhaps grant read/write access to allow full, global collaboration by a geographically dispersed team (with editing performed through Altium Designer).

• Sharing live (WIP) designs with people outside of your Workspace team as Guest users – for viewing and commenting only, or for editing – without the need to invite them into that team. This allows invited stakeholders to view/edit (as applicable) a live, work-in-progress design project, without gaining access to your full server of design data.

• Sharing of release data with your manufacturer through a defined Manufacturing Package, which they can then access through the Altium Platform's dedicated Manufacturing Package Viewer – without them having access to your Workspace its design data. They can then download the Build Package with which to get your board fabricated and assembled.

And at the most basic level of sharing, by:

• Sharing 'snapshots' of your designs and CAM manufacturing data – uploaded to your Personal Space on the Altium Platform – with anyone on a permanent basis. This level of sharing supports viewing and commenting of the shared snapshot. Keep in mind that for design snapshots it is just that, a static snapshot of the design at a particular point in time and not the live (WIP) design.

• Sharing your electronic designs and CAM manufacturing data through your web browser using the free, standalone Altium 365 Viewer. This level of sharing supports viewing of designs only.

Application Portals and Extensions

Along with the core Altium Workspace features provided by your purchased level of Altium software is a range of application Portals and system connector Extensions. These provide advanced software services for managing and working with ECAD projects, advanced BOM documents, formalized product Requirements and natively-linked MCAD designs.

The application Portal services are accessed from the Workspace Home page and its 9-dats menu, and currently include:

• Design Portal – the core structure and capabilities of an Altium Workspace, where product designs developed in Altium Designer or other ECAD software are stored and managed. Included is the ability to specify who has Workspace access, define how and where design data is shared, create and perform design reviews, manage component integrity and part libraries, work with interactive Comments and Tasks, and much more.

  Read about Altium Workspace.

• BOM Portal – an application dedicated to creating and managing advanced BOM project documents. BOM Portal documents source up-to-date manufacturer and parts supplier data from a range of Altium-provided resources, which offer part alternatives, lifecycle states, quality ratings, enhanced pricing, supplier lead times, expanded parametric data, and much more. The result is a reliable, procurement-ready BOM document that also can be interactively shared with Altium Designer, or combined with other BOM Pertal documents to create a Consolidated BOM that defines a multi-board product.

  Read about BOM Portal.

• Requirements Portal – an engineering-focused application that integrates with product designs to stipulate its specifications and compliance through defined Requirements instances. The system interacts directly with your Altium Workspace designs by allowing the management, review and verification of Requirements tasks within the context of the product design itself.

  Read about Requirements Portal.

• MCAD CoDesigner – enables interactive design collaboration with a range of mechanical (MCAD) design tools. Integration is at a system level, allowing the bidirectional exchange of 3D mechanical data between an Altium Designer ECAD design and the connected MCAD software design. The MCAD design software connection is established by a dedicated Altium CoDesigner plugin, which is currently available for Autodesk Fusion®, Autodesk Inventor®, Dassault Systemes SOLIDWORKS®, PTC Creo Parametric®, and Siemens NX®.

  Read about Altium MCAD CoDesigner.

The enabled Workspace Extension services integrate with Workspace features and applications (such as the BOM Portal) at a parametric level, and currently include:

• SiliconExpert – a provider of advanced component part data that includes curated parametric information covering risk assessment such as end-of-life projection, manufacturing and supply chain risk, lifecycle and compliance. The parts data, including suggested parts and alternatives, is directly incorporated in BOM Portal and design project documents, and also Workspace component library data.

  Read about SiliconExpert Data Integration.

• Z2Data – similar to above, Z2Data component parts data is an enhanced source of parametric information for Workspace BOM documents and the component Library. Note that Extensions are enabled and configured through the Workspace Admin – Extension page.

  Read about Z2Data Integration.

A Collaborative Platform for the Future...

The cloud-based Altium infrastructure platform, as it stands today, offers a highly effective range of software-based services for collaboration across disciplines. No installation or configuration, no manually updating to a new 'server release', browser-based and no extra processes to learn. But the experience doesn't stop there. Depending on your purchased Altium Platform Solution and the features available to you with that solution, you not only benefit from future updates to existing services and capabilities delivered through the platform, but also services and capabilities that have yet to appear.

Altium 365 will continue to grow and mature, and always with the focus on providing frictionless collaboration between all of the stakeholders involved in getting your next product completed on time, and the first time.