The following terminology is used to distinguish elements within the PCB domain: Altium Designer includes capabilities that allow designers to model both the footprint (land pattern) of the component as well as its 3D physical shape. In the past, items within a PCB Library have been generically referred to as Footprints, however this term is no longer strictly correct in the present-day context. PCB Domain Terminologyīefore taking a look at the process of releasing a PCB 2D/3D component model, it is worth taking a moment to become familiar with the related terminology involved. The interface to this process – the Library Importer – presents an intuitive flow that takes initial selected libraries, and imports them to your Workspace. Models can also be created in the Workspace as part of migration of existing, older generation (SchLib, PcbLib, IntLib, DbLib, SVNDbLib) libraries of components. Once a footprint has been created (and data saved into a revision of it), it can be reused in the creation of one or more components. Such footprints are created directly within the Workspace. These links are specified when defining the component.Īltium Designer, in conjunction with your connected Workspace, caters for the ability to create and manage footprints (Footprint Items) in that Workspace. In terms of its representation in the various domains, a component doesn't contain the domain models themselves, but rather links to these models. It could therefore be thought of as a container in this respect – a 'bucket' into which all domain models and parametric information is stored. From a designer's perspective, a Workspace component gathers together all information needed to represent that component across all design domains, within a single entity.

Altium designer footprint