DesignSpark Engineering Community Surpasses 750,000 Members

RS Components (RS), the trading brand of Electrocomponents plc, a global multi-channel provider of industrial and electronic products and solutions, and Allied Electronics & Automation multi-channel industrial distributor in the Americas, announced that its DesignSpark online engineering community has grown to more than 750,000 members. The DesignSpark family of free tools for electrical, PCB, mechanical design, and connectivity software are a valuable resource for product development and its popularity continues to grow.

Altium has completed an exclusive preview tour of its Altium Designer 18 at a series of global PCB design conferences. Altium Designer continues its focus on delivering new, easy-to-use and productivity enhancing PCB design tools as part of a single, unified application. Leveraging feedback and suggestions from the design community, Altium Designer 18 features capability updates and performance optimizations to significantly enhance user experience and productivity.

Cadence Design Systems announced the Cadence Virtuoso System Design Platform, a formal, streamlined and automated co-design and verification flow between the Cadence Virtuoso platform and Allegro PCB design and Sigrity modelling technologies. This higher level of integration enables engineers to design concurrently across the chip, package and board, automating what has until now been a manual process to minimize errors and save time.

Magic-PCB is an identification solution for the electronic industry from Beta Layout. This unique system for identifying PCBs and electronic devices is fast, copy-proof, reliable and virtually indestructible. This embedded RFID technology is now certified according to the US safety standards for Electronic products.

Altium announced expanded features for its upcoming Altium Designer 15.1 update, aiming to improve design productivity to meet the increasing complexity of today’s electronic design. Among several new features, Altium Designer 15.1 introduces new documentation output options, improved support for xSignals, expanded rigid-flex support and new design re-use features.