Altium Designer, Altium's unified electronic product development system, lets electronics designers take a new approach to system design by bringing together board-level hardware design, embedded software development and FPGA-based system design within a single unified environment. This unified design approach allows board-level designers to exploit the potential of FPGAs as a system platform, without the need for specialist FPGA skills. This reduces time-to-market and helps remove the barriers often found within design teams and the integration of their disparate toolsets.
Power management and power supply design is a crucial part of nearly all electronic product design projects, particularly those involving devices such as FPGAs, which can require several independent power rails.
SIMetrix/SIMPLIS is a powerful simulation engine, which has been optimized to provide unmatched simulation speed of switching circuits for power supplies. In addition to using Altium's in-built SPICE 3F5 simulator, engineers using Altium Designer can now use SIMetrix/SIMPLIS. On top of the speed advantages, SIMetrix/SIMPLIS combines accuracy and convergence which further supports challenging power system design.
SIMetrix/SIMPLIS is invoked directly from the Altium Designer schematic editor. The standard Altium Designer SPICE component models are translated on-the-fly for use by SIMetrix/SIMPLIS. Components can be linked directly to SIMetrix/SIMPLIS models if desired. Results are displayed in Altium Designer's powerful Wave display/editor for analysis and post processing, providing a completely clear simulation flow when using the SIMetrix/SIMPLIS engines.
Nick Martin, CEO of Altium, commented, "The innate characteristics of switch-mode power supplies make simulation using traditional SPICE simulators notoriously slow. The addition of support for SIMetrix/SIMPLIS gives our customers access to these powerful engines without leaving the unified Altium Designer environment, which will save them significant development time."
"As the pressures to reduce design cycle time continue to mount," said Tom Wilson, Vice President of Business Development, of Transim Technology, "the need to use simulation for final design verification is becoming critical." John Warner of Catena Software added, "The integration between Altium Designer and SIMetrix/SIMPLIS will make this design task easier and streamline overall design flows. This is a win for both Altium's customers and our customers."
Doug Richardson, CIO of Vicor, one of the world's leading suppliers of power products and components and user of both Altium Designer and SIMetrix/SIMPLIS, commented, "We can now complete our design flows entirely within the unified design environment provided by Altium Designer, while making full use of the power and versatility of the SIMetrix/SIMPLIS engines. A great result and time saving for us."
Altium Designer customers only need to purchase and install the SIMetrix/SIMPLIS version 5.3j product in order to make use of this new feature.
Availability
Support for SIMetrix/SIMPLIS will be included as standard within Altium Designer and made available in the next product update. Altium Designer 6 is available for immediate purchase through Altium's sales and support centres worldwide. For information on pricing, customers should contact their local Altium sales and support center. Details can be found at www.altium.com/contacts.
About Altium
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About Altium Designer
Altium Designer is the electronics design 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 quickens time to market. Altium Designer also delivers the freedom to move between any device, from any vendor, at any time. It lowers total cost of ownership by eliminating the need to integrate extra devices at extra cost to increase functionality, or to create a complete solution. For more information, please visit http://www.altium.com/Products/AltiumDesigner/.
About Catena
Catena Software Ltd is an autonomous member of the Catena group of companies. Based in the UK their core business is to provide intuitive and cost effective analogue design tools to the professional engineering community. Catena develops the SIMetrix simulation engine to support analogue mixed mode and IC design. http://www.catena.uk.com
About Transim
Transim Technology's SIMPLIS is the leading simulation engine for switched mode power supply design. The simulation engine has been rapidly adopted by leading power supply, computing and telecommunication equipment manufacturers in recent years and has become a standard for power supply system simulation and new product definition analysis. SIMPLIS is also the engine behind Transim's world leading Design Centre technology for web based design, marketing and application engineering solutions. For more information please visit http://www.transim.com.
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