Source: Altium
April 16,2008

The Altium Innovation Station adds more options for high-volume application development

Altium previews two new Xilinx® Spartan®-3A FPGA daughter boards 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 two new plug-in daughter boards with devices from the Xilinx® low-cost Spartan®-3 FPGA family for high-volume applications at ESC. These devices will join daughter boards already available using the Xilinx SpartanTM-3 FPGA family, as well as low-cost FPGA’s from other programmable logic vendors.

On show will be a Spartan-3AN daughter board featuring a XC3S1400AN non-volatile, I/O optimized FPGA in a 676-pin ball gate array (BGA) package. Spartan-3AN FPGAs are low-cost devices that combine the extensive features and high performance of SRAM FPGAs with the board security, space savings and ease-of-configurability of non-volatile FPGAs. They are highly suited to end-product applications such as consumer audio/video devices, communications and networking, and industrial and medical applications.

Altium is also showing a new Spartan-3A DSP FPGA daughter board housing a XC3SD3400A device, also in a 676-pin BGA package. The DSP-optimized Spartan-3A DSP devices are SRAM FPGAs that are particularly suitable for designs requiring low-cost FPGAs for signal processing applications such as military radio, surveillance cameras and medical imaging.

The addition of these two new Spartan daughter boards increase the design and deployment options available to designers using the Altium Innovation Station to harness the potential of FPGAs as a vehicle for developing next-generation products based on device intelligence programmed into to a reconfigurable platform.

“Low-cost, high-capacity programmable devices like the Xilinx Spartan-3 family really open the door to changing the way we can do electronic design,” said Nick Martin, CEO of Altium. “Today, you can’t really sustain any sort of product differentiation in hard-wired circuitry. Programming, rather than manufacturing intelligence into a device, is the only way to protect the unique functionality of a product in today’s globalized industry. Altium Designer and the NanoBoard allow electronic product developers to unlock the potential of large-scale programmable devices such as Xilinx Spartan-3 FPGAs, and build intelligent, connected products that can be easily updated to create and maintain market differentiation over the long term.”

Tim Erjavec, Director, Embedded & DSP Marketing at Xilinx said, “Altium’s support for Spartan-3 devices within its Innovation Station really opens up the potential of these devices to all engineers, even those who’ve never developed with FPGAs before. These low-cost devices make them suitable for a wide range of end-user applications, and this fits perfectly with Altium’s focus on unifying hardware, software and programmable device design with a single, easy-to-use, versatile design system.”

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.