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Altium’s Alternative
Turning System Design Inside Out
The sculptor Auguste Rodin was asked how he created his amazing statues. He replied, “I choose a block of marble and chip off whatever I don’t need.” Michelangelo is also sometimes attributed with a similar quote. “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.” These two quotes are probably the origin of the well-worn story about the sculptor who, when asked how to carve a statue of a horse said, “I simply chisel away everything that doesn’t look like a horse.”
These quotes, misquotes, and stories (I’m guessing Rodin probably answered in French in real life) all point to a key difference between sculpture and painting. Painting is additive, and sculpture is subtractive. As engineers, we are accustomed to an additive approach to electronic design. We start assembling something from a collection of pre-designed parts. We are finished when this collection of parts performs the function we desire.
What if electronic design could be more like sculpture? What if we could start with a superset system (akin to an electronic block of marble) and simply remove everything that doesn’t look like our design? Altium, Ltd. thinks that would be a pretty cool way to develop FPGA-based embedded systems. They’ve even developed the block of marble and the chisel to prove it. Their development system, consisting of their Altium Designer software and the newest version of their Nanoboard hardware platform, allows rapid development and prototyping of a wide variety of electronic systems, and then facilitates transition into production by essentially taking the prototype and eliminating the parts of the development system that aren’t needed for your project. [more]
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