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Review by Tim Blythman ALTIUM DESIGNER 26 With each new year comes a new major version of the Altium Designer EDA (electronics design automation) software. Now that we have had the chance to use Altium Designer 26 for a while, we will detail what we have found. L ike much modern software, Altium Designer sees frequent updates, so the changes that we see are often incremental improvements. For this review, we are using Altium Designer version 26.2.0. Our last review, in the June 2025 issue, was of version 25.0.2 (siliconchip.au/Article/18307). New minor versions appear about monthly, so some of our observations in this article will be of features that first appeared after that review, including versions after Altium Designer 25.0.2. In the Altium Designer 25 review, we noted that Altium had been acquired by Japanese semiconductor company Renesas. EDA (electronics design automation) software is best known for its ability to design PCBs, but Altium Designer has many features that go beyond this, such as PCB CoDesign and MCAD (mechanical computer-­ aided design) integration. CoDesign refers to being able to collaborate with other engineering disciplines; this is mostly managed through Altium 365. MCAD typically relates to project aspects such as enclosures and similar hardware. Over the last few years, we have also seen the introduction of the Harness Designer (for the design of wiring harnesses) and support for 3D-MID designs (three-dimensional mechatronic integrated devices). The 3D-MID manufacturing process uses a custom 3D-printed substrate in place of a traditional 2D fibreglass substrate. This means that the substrate which forms the PCB can also be shaped to work as an enclosure, making designs 84 Silicon Chip more compact. We published a feature on 3D-MID and similar technologies in the April 2025 issue (siliconchip.au/ Article/17936). Altium Designer 25 introduced the ability to create designs using bare COB (chip-on-board) silicon dies and bond wires. Wire bonding allows COB dies to be incorporated as components and connected to the PCB by bond wires. The Constraint Manager has also been added to provide a unified, hierarchical way to manage the design constraints of a project. Currently, it is offered as an alternative to the older PCB Design Rules. Existing projects can be converted to use the Constraint Manager. Many new features are introduced as optional features available only to registered beta testers. Beta software is mostly complete but may still have minor bugs. After ‘beta testing’, the features are made widely available but can be disabled by an option switch in the Advanced section of the Preferences menu. If you can’t immediately find a new feature, check to see that it is not hidden as a beta or optional feature. Some features may also be unavailable depending on your license inclusions. Licensing changes Probably the biggest change to coincide with Altium Designer 26 is the way that subscriptions are being licensed and bundled with other features. Roughly speaking, the new Altium Develop product is comparable to a Standard or Pro license and is intended for smaller teams. It includes the Altium 365 cloud platform. Australia's electronics magazine Above this sits Altium Agile, consisting of the Teams and Enterprise subcategories. Ultimately, the core Altium Designer software remains much the same, but the different product lines include different features and tools for data management, such as Altium 365. Fig.1 shows the web page at www.altium.com that highlights the different options. We are a small team developing relatively simple designs, so we do not need all of Altium Designer’s advanced features. Some advanced tools are aimed at things like compliance, traceability and security in heavily regulated fields such as medical electronics; these are well above our needs. Logging into an Altium account is now via a ‘unified login’ in a browser, which also provides access to other services such as the Altium 365 Workspace. Depending on your chosen access method, this could include a simple email address and password, SSO (single sign-on) scheme, or twostep verification. Altium Discover Yet to launch at the time of writing is the recently announced Altium Discover. This tool will take in a set of project requirements and analyse reference designs from manufacturers to provide high-level design suggestions for components, such as chips and modules, to help fulfil those requirements (see www.altium.com/ discover). The web page at www.altium.com/ capabilities/requirements suggests that an AI assistant will be part of this process, being used to analyse and siliconchip.com.au Fig.1: the new AD26 licensing scheme. Altium Develop and Altium Agile both incorporate Altium Designer and Altium 365. The upcoming Altium Discover will suggest project solutions from design requirements. Fig.2: the Harness Designer now shows break points in harness diagrams where necessary. summarise the vast quantities of information that need to be reconciled in developing a complex design. With Altium owning the Octopart parts database, such a tool would have access to information such as availability, pricing and technical specifications to feed into these analyses. The Manufacturer Part Search within Altium Designer makes use of the Octopart database; we often use this to import new components to our library. In our series on How to Design PCBs, published in December 2025 to February 2026 (siliconchip.com. au/Series/453), we work through the steps needed to design and manufacture PCBs. In particular, we use Altium Designer’s Schematic Editor and PCB Editor for the design stages. at www.altium.com/documentation/ altium-designer/new while upcoming features are highlighted at www. altium.com/altium-designer/coming-­ soon In our Altium Designer 25 review, we mentioned that the underlying software was transitioned to the opensource .NET 6 framework. Starting with version 26.10 of Altium Designer, this has been updated to .NET 8, allowing Altium Designer to benefit from newer features in the framework, as well as promising a performance increase. This update means that Altium Designer can no longer run on Windows 7 or Windows 8. As has been the case in the past, newer versions of Altium Designer can also be installed alongside older versions. AD26 overview Improvements We have previously noted Altium’s focus on continuous improvement, and Altium Designer 26 follows this trend. The latest features can be found Small but helpful updates have appeared in Harness Designer, particularly in relation to the creation of harness manufacturing drawings. This siliconchip.com.au Australia's electronics magazine includes automatic annotation of bundle lengths and the embedding of 3D models. For bundles that cannot be displayed at their true scale length, a break symbol indicates this – see Fig.2. Altium Designer has the ability to import designs from other EDA tools, which we find handy, since we occasionally need to process contributed designs that have been developed using other software. There are a number of improvements noted in the importing tools since our last review. Fig.3 shows the Import Wizard and the options that are available in Altium Designer. Solder mask expansion rules We are also seeing continuous improvement in the capabilities of PCB manufacturers, and it makes sense that these should be reflected in Altium Designer’s behaviour. In particular, PCB manufacturers can achieve smaller feature sizes and tighter tolerances. This will generally mean that July 2026  85 Fig.3: the Import Wizard can handle the file types shown here, and there are many more options in the native File → Open menu. It’s also possible to add other importers for files produced by tools such as KiCad. Fig.4: these pads on an SSOP (small shrink outline package) IC with 0.65mm lead pitch show the advantages of reducing solder mask expansion in line with modern PCB manufacturing capabilities. The default 0.1mm expansion at left does not allow solder mask between the packs, while the zero solder mask expansion at right provides the best defence against bridging pads. smaller designs and closer spacings become more achievable (or cheaper!). Over time, we have been able to update our design rules with tighter spacing and clearances where this is necessary or helpful. Since we often present our projects as kits, they are intended for manual assembly, and having appropriate solder mask coverage can be helpful for avoiding bridging between narrowly spaced leads. Previously, some pins (especially on small surface-mount parts) were so closely spaced that it was not possible to provide solder mask in the gap; the so-called solder mask sliver between the pads would have been thinner than what the PCB manufacturer could reliably produce. This is compounded because the tolerances of older processes dictated a narrow margin between a pad and its solder mask opening; this is the ‘solder mask expansion’ and Fig.4 shows how this reduces the available space between close pads. It appears that many PCB manufacturers now use a LPI (Liquid Photo Imageable) solder mask process, which requires negligible solder mask expansion; this expansion is the border left around a pad to ensure that the solder mask does not encroach upon the pad due to tolerances in the process. So-called zero solder mask expansion is now possible and is the default in IPC-7351B, the industry standard for surface-mount device land Fig.7: being able to add QR codes and other 2D codes allows more machinereadable information to be printed on PCBs. This can include tracking codes and product identifiers. 86 Silicon Chip patterns (footprints). As of Altium Designer 26.1.0, the default solder mask expansion rule has been set to zero. Of course, this can be changed in the rules if needed or manually set for individual pad requirements. ActiveBOM The bill of materials (BOM) for a project is an important document, and Altium’s ActiveBOM is a tool for managing this. We often use a simple spreadsheet-based BOM (which Altium Designer can export) to ensure our parts lists and kit listings are correct. The BoM CoDesign feature is intended to allow collaboration with the purchasing and procurement departments in relation to the PCB BOM. This can provide live information about parts availability, alternatives and lead times from the Octopart database. Figs.5 & 6 show a typical BOM and its supply chain status. QR codes For a while now, Altium Designer has been able to create 1D (linear) barcodes as part of a PCB document. These would typically be applied to the silkscreen layer to act as machine-readable identifiers for stock and part management. It’s now possible to add QR codes and DataMatrix codes; these are two different types of 2D codes that can be Australia's electronics magazine siliconchip.com.au Fig.5: the BoM CoDesign tool can be used by procurement teams; there is a more detailed supply chain view that can highlight potential issues with specific line items. Fig.6: the BoM CoDesign tool presents a range of information relating to part options and supply chain availability. used to encode more data than a linear barcode. Fig.7 shows a QR code being instantly generated to encode the PCB code on one of our PCBs. We delved into QR codes while reviewing a tiny QR code reader module in the February 2026 issue (siliconchip.au/ Article/19663). Free stuff Altium Designer still offers a free trial at www.altium.com/altium-­ designer/free-trial/roadmap although this page also notes that the website is being updated, so this may change in the future. Altium CircuitMaker (www.altium.com/circuitmaker) is also free to use. CircuitMaker is an EDA tool aimed siliconchip.com.au at hobbyists and makers. It is built on the same engine as Altium Designer and allows designs to be easily shared with other CircuitMaker users. We reviewed CircuitMaker in January 2019 (siliconchip.au/Article/11378). Even if you don’t use Altium Designer, they have a trove of resources relating to PCB design, including a guide to getting started at www.altium. com/documentation/altium-designer/ tutorial and the Altium Academy YouTube channel at www.youtube.com/<at> AltiumAcademy Summary It’s not surprising that the Renesas purchase of Altium has seen some changes to the way the product Australia's electronics magazine is delivered, with the new Altium Develop and Altium Agile products being introduced. The Altium Discover product sounds like it will provide an interesting addition to the Altium repertoire. Altium Designer 26 continues to improve; the advances in the Harness Designer and BOM tools continue the trend of Altium’s tools gaining a wider scope beyond simple PCB design and layout. It’s good to see contemporary updates to the PCB Editor, such as QR codes and alignment with modern PCB manufacturing standards. For more information on the software, see www.altium.com – it can be downloaded from www.altium.com/ SC products/downloads July 2026  87