Altium, a developer of Windows-based electronics design software, unveiled a product roadmap for P-CAD, the company's professional tools for board layout specialists.
 
The announcement comes on the heels of the January release of Service Pack 1 (SP1), which provided customer feedback contributed on Altium's P-CAD Forum. The company gives service packs free of charge to licensed users.
 
 "Altium is committed to the ongoing development of the P-CAD design system," said Nick Martin, founder and Joint CEO, Altium. "We are presenting our customers with a systematic, approachable and incremental way to realize value from their investments with Altium."
 
Service Pack 2 (SP2) for P-CAD is currently in beta testing and expected to release in the second quarter, with Service Pack 3 already planned for release in Q3.
 
Altium will deliver a variety of enhancements in SP2 designed to give greater power and control over the PCB design process. Productivity enhancements include Variants, which can now be defined in both schematic and PCB with full ECO support in both directions, as well as the ability to run multiple instances of all P-CAD applications.
 
The addition of backwards compatibility support facilitates staggered upgrades within companies and trouble-free interaction between internal and external organizations.  Efficiency has been improved with layer ordering for printing and important improvements to copper pours.
 
SP2 will also come with increased routing power due to improvements to glossing and hugging performance, and the Specctra/Situs Exporter.
 
 
Altium Ltd., altium.com