Altium Designer

Seats

We have 9 concurrent seats of the software (down from 100 in years past). This is due to a large price increase that Altium did in 2015 (from 100 seats for $2000 to $100 a seat).

Download Software

New versions of Altium Designer can be downloaded from here.

Licensing

Our license is managed through Altium On-Demand licensing. Previously, we hosted an Altium Designer Private License Server on ecelic, but the Altium service kept hogging resources (100% CPU and all spare RAM). While hogging all the resources, it also would not actually serve the licenses, and it would deprive the other license daemons on the computer resources they needed to work properly. When we contacted Altium about it, their response was that the Private License Server was not supported on a VM and they would not attempt to fix it. Currently there is no charge for the On-Demand licensing service, so we are using that rather than set up a physical server.

In order to use On-Demand licensing, each user must have an Altium Live account. The current CSR, Dr. Wilde, or Dr. Warnick can all add users, but in practice it is usually the CSR. Log in to Altium Live here. Click “Dashboard” and then “Users.” You will then be able to add, deactivate, or delete users. New users simply need a first and last name and an email address. Altium will then contact them to complete the setup of their account, which they will be able to log in with when using Altium Designer.

Occasionally, Altium will say that a user already has an Altium Live account. Accounts are keyed off their email address, so as long as we have not already entered them in our group, this means the user already has an Altium Live account on the specified email address with another group or institution (e.g. another university or a company). You can put in a request to have Altium transfer the Live account to our organization in order to be associated with our license, but it's often much easier if the user can simply provide an alternate email address.