Source: Altium
April 16, 2008

Altium boosts device support of its Innovation Station

Altium shows plug-in Actel® ProASIC®3E daughter board for its NanoBoard reconfigurable hardware development platform

SAN JOSE, Calif. – April 15, 2008 – Altium Limited, the electronics design industry’s leading developer of unified electronic product development solutions, continues to expand its range of daughter boards for its Desktop NanoBoard and Altium Innovation Station.

Altium is previewing a new Actel® ProASIC®3E-based plug-in daughter board for the NanoBoard platform, at ESC in San Jose (April 15-18).

Altium’s Actel ProASIC3E daughter board provides an A3PE1500 FPGA in a 676-pin fine-pitch ball grid array (FBGA) package, and also features a range of on-board memories for application use.

Optimized for performance, Actel’s low-power, flash-based ProASIC3E FPGAs are well suited to a wide range of end-product applications. Once programmed, the ProASIC3E devices retain configuration, eliminating the need for an external device to load configuration data at power-up, thereby reducing cost, minimizing power consumption, increasing security, and maximizing system reliability when using these devices with Altium’s Innovation Station. Further, the design environment makes it easy to bring system functionality into the programmable space and rapidly create and deploy ‘soft’ systems for production applications.

“Altium is providing the tools to help designers innovate in this new marketplace by turning traditional electronics design inside out and moving the soft functionality of a product to the center of the design process,” said Nick Martin, CEO and founder of Altium. “The Altium Innovation Station allows designers to unlock the potential of low-power, re-programmable devices, such as Actel’s flash-based ProASIC3E FPGA, to form a platform on which to build intelligent, connected products that can be easily updated in the field.”

Hezi Saar, senior manager, product marketing of Actel commented, “Time and cost are serious pressures on today’s designers. Altium’s plug-in daughter boards will allow designers to explore design alternatives without time or cost penalties. The new Altium ProASIC3E-based daughter card will allow users of Altium’s Innovation Station to fully exploit the low-power, low cost, flexibility and performance advantages of Actel’s flash-based ProASIC3E FPGAs.”

Altium is at ESC from April 15 -17, 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 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.