Not all design work is done in Altium Designer. If you are new to Altium Designer, you will undoubtedly have designs in some other file format – either from an older Altium design solution, or some other EDA vendor tool. Even if you are an existing user of Altium Designer day-in, day-out, there may be times where you are presented with a design created outside of Altium Designer. Supporting your need to work with design files in other formats and from other tools, install this plugin to import a Protel 99SE Design Database (
*.ddb).
Import is performed using the
Import Wizard (
File»Import Wizard). The
Import Wizard will guide you through the steps involved in the import process, including:
- Specifying which specific DDBs to process, or all DDBs in a specific folder.
- Specifying an output folder for all files subsequently extracted from each DDB.
- Defining schematic conversion options.
- Defining project mapping options.
- Fine-tuning how Altium Designer projects will be created, through mapping and document addition options.
Note that file formats for Schematic, PCB and related library files are different in Altium Designer to those used in Protel 99SE. Import will bring the files into Altium Designer in their original formats. For Schematic, Schematic Library and PCB Library files, you can open the files but will be asked whether you wish to convert them to a later format each time you save. Opening a PCB design document will cause the
DXP Import Wizard to launch, guiding you through the steps to convert to the Altium Designer PCB document format.
See Also:
Important!
This plugin is only available for Altium Designer 13.0 or older versions.
Altium Designer 14.0+ Users: You can install this plugin in the Extensions & Updates section in Altium Designer.
