"We've long seen that the future of electronic product development lies in utilizing the full potential of programmable logic technology to accelerate hardware and software design, allowing more innovative products to be developed faster," commented Nick Martin, Altium's Founder and Chief Executive Officer. "Devices such as Altera's Cyclone III FPGAs play a crucial role in this future by enabling developers of electronic products to use programmable devices across a wider range of applications."
Altium Designer is the first system to bring together hardware, software and programmable hardware design within a single, unified design environment. In doing so, Altium Designer accelerates electronic product design and opens up new possibilities for design innovation by enabling hardware and software engineers -- regardless of their level of FPGA design experience -- to easily exploit the potential of programmable devices.
Altium is expanding the wide range of programmable devices already supported by Altium Designer with the addition of the Cyclone III family. Engineers using the system can easily target any supported device during development, eliminating the need to change development platforms or purchase additional software and specific device support modules. Altium Designer's unified design environment also allows designers to easily retarget the programmable hardware elements of a design to a range of different processor platforms, both FPGA-hosted and discrete, during development without significant software or hardware rework. This means that crucial application architecture decisions can remain open and easily changeable until much later in the development cycle than currently possible.
For full embedded systems development, Altium Designer includes an extensive set of ready-to-use 'soft' components that can be used to target a wide range of programmable devices, including the Altera Cyclone III device. Developers can also easily implement processors, such as the Altera Nios II embedded processor (already fully supported by Altium Designer) and Altium Designer's TSK3000 soft-core RISC processor, within any suitably sized Cyclone series device.
"Our Cyclone series of devices has been customer defined to service the growing need for low-cost programmable technology, and the Cyclone III family takes this to new heights," said Danny Biran, vice president of product and corporate marketing at Altera. "Altium's prompt support for the Cyclone III family, and their focus on helping electronics designers harness the power of programmable logic to drive the development of innovative products, complements our market-expansion goals that are behind this new, low-power, high-functionality, low-cost device family."
Pricing and availability
Support for the new Altera Cyclone III family is now available with the latest software update for Altium Designer 6 -- Altium Designer 6.7. All Altium Designer 6 license holders can download this update for free at http://www.altium.com/Community/Support/SoftwareUpdates/. Altium Designer 6 is available for immediate purchase through Altium's sales and support centers worldwide. For information on pricing and flexible product licensing options, customers should contact their local Altium sales and support center. Details can be found at www.altium.com/contacts.
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 (
Altium, Altium Designer 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.
US Media Contact: Emily Taylor Weber Shandwick Worldwide 519 SW 3rd Avenue, Suite 600 Portland, OR 97204 United States www.webershandwick.com Telephone: 503-552-3733 Email: Email Contact Altium Media Contact: Elisa Davies Altium Limited Level 3, 12a Rodborough Road Frenchs Forest, NSW 2086 Australia www.altium.com Telephone: +61 2 9975 7710 Email: Email Contact
