What’s the difference between tools that are integrated compared to Altium Designer’s unified system?
An integrated design system is a collection of job-specific ‘point tools’ that exchange design data via custom processes, as the design moves down the product development chain. This is the type of system offered by the majority of EDA vendors, and indeed is the basis of our former P-CAD and Protel products. At best this approach can only streamline processes within the boundaries of each individual point tool. Each tool has different design data and operating environment, so the design data must be ‘passed over the wall’ to the next process as the design progresses. Integrated systems are easy to spot because they use multiple applications and sets of design data, and include interconnection paths or frameworks for passing design data between those applications. Altium Designer is the world’s first and only unified design system. Built from the ground up on Altium’s DXP platform, it brings together all of the design disciplines into a single application and uses a single model of the
