Source: Altium
April 16, 2008

Altium Innovation Station extends into high-performance electronics design sector

Altium previews new Xilinx® Virtex®-5 FPGA daughter board at ESC

SAN JOSE, Calif. – April 15, 2008 – Altium Limited, the electronics design industry’s leading developer of unified electronic product development solutions, continues to expand the range of plug-in programmable device daughter boards for the Altium Innovation Station, just two months after its launch.

Altium is showing a pre-production version of a new plug-in daughter board featuring a state-of-the-art Xilinx® high-performance Virtex®-5 FPGA. Altium's Xilinx Virtex-5 daughter board provides an XC5VLX50T FPGA in an 1136-pin ball grid array (BGA) package combined with a range of on-board memories. The daughter board also provides connectors for the devices RocketIO high-speed transceivers, gigabit Ethernet and dual 3Gbit SATA interfaces

Adding the Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA daughter board to the range opens up the Altium Innovation Station to designers requiring the high-performance logic with low-power serial connectivity offered by the 65nm Virtex-5 LXT platform for applications such as networking, telecom, storage, servers and high-performance computing.

“The release of a Virtex-5 FPGA daughter board for our NanoBoard system increases the options that designers have when using the Altium Innovation Station to explore and develop functionality targeted at innovative applications,” said Nick Martin, CEO and founder of Altium. “The potential of high-performance devices such as the Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA as a development platform for next-generation electronics products is enormous. Altium is supplying the tools that let all designers harness this potential to build intelligent, connected products that can be easily updated to create and maintain market differentiation over the long term.”

Tim Erjavec, Director of Embedded and DSP Marketing at Xilinx commented, “The Virtex-5 family of FPGAs offers extremely high performance capabilities to the market and sits at the forefront of FPGA technology. Being able to exploit the unique system-level and performance features of these devices within the Altium Innovation Station means designers can rapidly and effectively build high-performance platforms for their applications and easily explore the full capabilities they offer.”

Altium is at ESC from April 15 to 17, on booth number 1730.

About Altium
Altium Limited (ASX:ALU) is the 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 has headquarters in Sydney, Australia, sales offices in the United States, Europe, Japan, China, and resellers in all other major markets. For more information, please visit www.altium.com.

About the Altium Innovation Station
The Altium Innovation Station combines the Altium Designer electronics development software with Altium’s NanoBoard range of reconfigurable hardware development and deployment platforms to provide a single design environment for engineering sustainable differentiation in electronics design. Together, they allow electronics designers to create value and innovation in their products by focusing on designing device intelligence that is programmed rather than manufactured into a product.

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. It unifies the design of the hardware, software and programmable hardware by removing the disparate design flows of old design paradigms.

Altium's Desktop NanoBoard range of reconfigurable hardware platforms allows for both the development and deployment of device intelligence based on programmable devices such as FPGAs. Altium's NanoBoard architecture is unique in that it comes complete with a range of programmable devices housed on plug-in FPGA daughter boards, and interchangeable peripheral boards. The development NanoBoard provides a versatile reconfigurable development platform independent of the choice of FPGAs. In the future, deployment NanoBoards will allow rapid completion of the design process to final hardware – without the constraints of having to design physical hardware early in the design process.

For more information, please visit http://www.altium.com/Products/AltiumDesigner/.

Altium, Altium Designer, LiveDesign, and their respective logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of Altium Limited or its subsidiaries. All other registered or unregistered trademarks referenced herein are the property of their respective owners, and no trademark rights to the same are claimed.

It joins the Xilinx SpartanTM-3, Altera® CycloneTM II and Lattice ECPTM devices in the daughter board range for the Desktop NanoBoard development platform.