Engaging the interactive router from the Active Bar in Altium Designer Below you can see the active bar, and if you hold your mouse down on the interactive routing icon, you will pop up a drop-down menu with more routing options to pick from. There is the option of going through the “Route” pulldown menu, but I usually use the keystroke combination “Ctrl+W”, or the interactive routing icon in the active bar. Depending on what I’m doing, there are a couple of ways that I engage the routing mode. One of the first things that will help you is just starting the interactive router. Make sure that you’re equipped knowing, ultimately, what you want your board design to accomplish and where you anticipate potential problem areas to be. Traces, connection lines, differential pair routing, and route paths can all affect the routing process of your board. Helpful Tips While Interactive Routing in Altium Designerīefore you jump into the software, you should know the types of things you’re going to want to look out for. There are many more of course, but these will give you a great start on knowing those simple little functions that will significantly help you while you are interactively routing. To help us all out, here are a few of the more routing functions, shortcuts, and processes that everyone should be familiar with when interactive routing in Altium Designer ®. Or, you’re working on an HDI PCB and can’t manually trace such detail effectively.ĭon’t worry we all go through the occasional “brain-slip” of forgetting something like that now and then. You’re trying to route some tracks in, and you need to change a trace width, but you can’t quite remember how it’s done. On the flip side, though is the frustration that you can feel when you can’t get the PCB design tools to work the way you know that they should. It can be therapeutic, cathartic, relaxing, and (if you aren’t under a lot of pressure to complete your design), downright fun. I haven’t met a PCB designer yet who doesn’t like to route tracks on their design manually.

Altium designer 17 keyboard shortcuts