Source: Altium
February 13, 2007

Altium showcases new NanoBoard-NB2 at Embedded World 2007

EMBEDDED WORLD, Nuremberg, Germany – February 13, 2007 – Altium Limited (ASX: ALU), industry-leading developer of unified electronic product development solutions, today announced that it will be showcasing its next-generation NanoBoard-NB2 – a unique reconfigurable development board targeting unified processor/FPGA system design – at the Embedded World trade show in Nuremberg, Germany this week. Altium is now ramping up for full production of the NanoBoard-NB2 and is taking advance orders from developers wanting to ensure theirs is amongst the first off the production line.

Altium’s NanoBoard-NB2 provides developers with a highly re-configurable and extendable hardware platform on which to implement and interactively debug embedded designs targeted to a wide range of processor and FPGA architectures. The NanoBoard architecture allows engineers to fully exploit the hardware/software co-design capabilities of Altium Designer, the industry’s first unified electronic product development system that brings together board-level design, FPGA design and embedded software development. Altium Designer allows engineers to take a new approach to system design by seamlessly combining software, processors, and FPGA hardware and the embedding of ‘intelligence’ into their applications.

Altium unveiled an early prototype of the NanoBoard-NB2 to great interest at last years’ Embedded Systems Conference, Silicon Valley, San Jose. Since that time, Altium has further refined the design to make the NanoBoard-NB2 even more feature-rich, versatile and easy-to-use, and to ensure it perfectly complements the latest version of Altium Designer. These enhancements include a dramatically enhanced audio subsystem, an SD card reader, USB connectivity, infrared remote control capability and a re-designed daughter board to support a much larger number of IO connections from the target FPGA to the connected peripherals.

"Creating a development board that harnesses the opportunities offered by the latest programmable device technologies has been the primary driver for the development of the NanoBoard-NB2. This 'LiveDesign' system provides engineers with a real-time development environment and is aimed at making it easy to design and build leading-edge electronic products," commented Nick Martin, Altium founder and CEO. "With both Altium Designer and the NanoBoard-NB2 we have pioneered concepts, features and functionality that have not been seen before in an electronic product development system. The NanoBoard architecture itself is a groundbreaking design and the NanoBoard-NB2 goes even further to unlock the potential of 'soft' design for electronics designers so they can create and build applications that are only limited by their own imaginations.”

The NanoBoard-NB2’s support for plug-in daughter boards and now new swappable peripheral boards provides engineers with a ‘future-proofed’ electronics development system. As new processors, FPGAs and peripheral devices become available, engineers will not have to switch to a new development system in order to experiment with them, as is the case with fixed, single-target development boards.

At its initial release, three daughter boards will be available for the NanoBoard-NB2. Customers can choose between an Altera® Cyclone™ II, a LatticeECP™, or a Xilinx®-Spartan™ -3 FPGA device daughter board when they purchase. The NanoBoard-NB2 daughter boards are backwards compatible with the NanoBoard-NB1. The NanoBoard-NB2 can also be daisy-chained together with the NanoBoard-NB1 or multiple NanoBoard-NB2s for the development of complex systems comprising of multiple FPGA devices spread across multiple PCBs.

The NanoBoard-NB2 will also supply as standard three plug-in peripheral boards – an audio/video connector board, a compact flash/ATA/SD card board, and communications board containing USB, IrDA and Ethernet connectivity.

"Since demonstrating early prototypes at ESC last year, we've been working hard on strengthening the concepts that underpin the NanoBoard-NB2 and its links to Altium Designer, our unified electronics design system," continued Nick Martin. "We've had a great response to Altium Designer from electronic
designers around the world and we are seeing solid traction with the systems' uptake throughout the industry. There has been allot of interest in this latest-generation NanoBoard, and I'm sure there will be plenty of excitement at what we have achieved.”

Visitors attending Embedded World, Nuremberg, will be able to interact live with the NanoBoard-NB2 at the Altium booth 11-236 on the exhibition centre show floor.

Pricing and availability
Altium will begin taking advanced orders for the NanoBoard-NB2 immediately. The price for the Altium NanoBoard-NB2 will be US$2,495.

Altium has also announced today that customers purchasing a new Altium Designer unified license before June 30, 2007 can purchase the NanoBoard-NB2 at the special introductory price of US$995. Customers who have a NanoBoard-NB1 can also purchase the NanoBoard-NB2 at this special introductory price. Customers should contact their local Altium sales and support center for more details on this offer and to secure their NanoBoard-NB2 from the first commercial run.

The latest version of Altium Designer – Altium Designer 6.6 – is available for immediate purchase through Altium’s sales and support centers worldwide. For information and pricing on product licensing options, customers should contact their local Altium sales and support center. Details can be found at www.altium/contacts.

About Altium’s NanoBoard-NB2
Altium's NanoBoard-NB2 (nano-level breadboard), the next-generation of the industry's first LiveDesign-enabled FPGA-based development board, allows rapid and interactive implementation and debugging of electronics designs. The NanoBoard-NB2 has been specially designed to take full advantage of Altium Designer’s unified electronic product development system and will transform every engineer’s desktop into a complete and interactive FPGA-based electronics product development laboratory. Altium's NanoBoard architecture is unique in that it features swappable peripheral boards and target programmable devices are housed on plug-in FPGA daughter boards. This enables engineers to easily change the target project architecture and provides a truly FPGA vendor-independent and versatile reconfigurable development platform. For more information, please visit http://www.altium.com/Products/NanoBoardNB2/.

About Altium Designer
Altium Designer is the industry’s only electronics product development system that removes the barriers imposed by disparate design flows and unifies the different design disciplines involved in electronics product development – the design of the hardware, the programmable hardware and the embedded software. Altium Designer’s unified design environment means users can harness the potential of the latest electronics technologies, and move to a ‘soft’ design methodology without the need to acquire specialist programmable device expertise. This provides companies with increased design flexibility, reduced production costs and speeds time-to-market. Altium Designer also delivers the freedom to move between any device, from any vendor, at any time and lowers total cost of ownership by eliminating the need to integrate extra-cost add-ons to increase functionality, or make up a complete solution. For more information, please visit http://www.altium.com/Products/AltiumDesigner/.

About Altium
Altium Limited (ASX:ALU) is the industry’s leading developer of electronic product development solutions dedicated to unifying the different design disciplines involved in electronics product development. Altium products ensure all electronic engineers, designers, developers, and their organizations, take maximum advantage of emerging design technologies to bring smarter products to market faster and easier. Founded in 1985, Altium is headquartered in Sydney, Australia with sales offices in the United States, Europe, Japan, China, and resellers in all other major markets. For more information, please visit www.altium.com.

Altium, Altium Designer, LiveDesign, NanoBoard, NanoBoard-NB1, NanoBoard-NB2 and their respective logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of Altium Limited or its subsidiaries. ‘Altera’ and ‘Cyclone’ are trademarks or registered trademarks of Altera Corporation. ‘Lattice’ and ‘LatticeECP’ are trademarks or registered trademarks of Lattice Semiconductor Corporation. ‘Xilinx’ and ‘Spartan’ are trademarks or registered trademarks of Xilinx. All other registered or unregistered trademarks referenced herein are the property of their respective owners, and no trademark rights to the same are claimed.