Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1470111
JUNE 2022 I DESIGN007 MAGAZINE 45 emails and phone calls that typically add days or even weeks to the process. It's a much smoother, cleaner user experi- ence, and it eliminates many of those chal- lenges we talked about. e key is it's con- necting our users to a modern manufacturer— MacroFab—which can source the parts, build the board, and ultimately deliver it to spec to the end customer. Altimade is available through the combination of Altium Designer and Altium 365. Shaughnessy: What does this look like? Pawela: We want to give the designer signals as he designs so he doesn't have to wait until it gets to the end of his design, but as he chooses components and places those components, at any point he can pull up a new manufactur- ing panel inside of Altium Designer and get a rapid prototype quote. It tells the designer that, based on what you've designed so far, here's what it would look like in terms of the amount of time to get that board and what the cost envelope looks like as well. So, it is based on the BOM, but it's also based on the board itself and being able to manufacture it. e key point is to inform designers of any issues well ahead of finishing the design so that they can make different decisions with respect to sourcing their bill of materials and laying out their board. For example, we're not just telling them, "Yes, this component is available," only to find out that there were only three in stock, and they're gone by the time they are actually ready to order. We're continuously providing real-time information on pricing, availability, and even more advanced things like the lifecy- cle status of that component. Will it be obsolete two years, a year, or even six months from now, when we move from prototyping into produc- tion? Now, you can make smarter decisions. Shaughnessy: It sounds like you're literally connected to the manufacturer, so the manu- facturer can see exactly what you see. Pawela: Yes. You both see the same bill of materials. Both the designer and the manu- facturer can see, for example, what the substi- tute to functional equivalence that I could put into that design is to get to do the same thing, and they're not emailing that back and forth; they're seeing that directly inside of the appli- cation. And the manufacturer doesn't need to know how to use Altium Designer, by the way; they only need a web browser, in which case they will see all the same things from within the Altium 365 web browser interface. ese capabilities allow us to move from design for manufacturing to designing with manufactur- ing, and I think that's a big part of what we're bringing to market now. And the other part of it is that the designer won't have to sit and wonder, "Well, is it get- ting close to being done? Do they have my bill of materials yet? If they source that, is it even on the line yet? Are they doing something with it?" I want to hear something. I want to know something without having to pick up the phone every day. We are creating an experience that is very much analogous to Uber in that from the time you place that order, you see everything that happens with it. You don't have to call and ask for it; it's right there in Altium 365 and Altium Designer. You can see, yes, the order has been accepted, the bare board has been ordered, and all the other components have been received. is board is now moving from manufacturing into testing, for example. And this, of course, is really valuable when, inevitably, if we're successful with a product, we're moving beyond prototyping and moving to production. is would be a good time for me to let Misha talk a little bit about MacroFab. Misha Govshteyn: I'd be happy to tell you a bit more about MacroFab. We've built the service over the years to be a cloud manufacturing platform for electronics. We have a network of factories that work in our digital ecosystem and we can build products all the way from proto-