NEWS

WIRES

OTHER

Altium Designer Simplifies Third-Party FPGA Core Integration

New Time-Saving Tool Enables Direct Import From Xilinx(R) Core Generator and Altera(R) Megafunction Wizard

Altium Limited (ASX: ALU) today announced that it has added support for the direct import of FPGA cores generated by third-party applications to its Altium Designer unified electronic product development system. This new tool makes the creation and import of highly-optimized, device-specific custom FPGA cores from device vendor tools such as Xilinx's Core Generator and Altera's Megafunction Wizard easy and efficient and significantly enhances the ability of FPGA developers to take full advantage of the high-level design capabilities of Altium Designer to accelerate system development.

Altium Designer's new FPGA Third-Party Core Import Wizard eliminates the challenges associated with bringing in third-party cores, which has, up until now, been a complex, multi-step task for developers. This new time-saving feature guides users through the process and automatically handles the accurate transfer of all the necessary information. The Wizard intelligently imports the required files, updates the target project structure and gives developers additional options for creating schematic library components or sheet symbols representing the imported core. This allows developers to simply place the imported FPGA core directly into their design.

"Altium Designer is about giving all engineers the ability to harness the latest in electronics devices to stimulate innovation and accelerate application development," commented Nick Martin, founder and CEO, Altium Limited. "By making the process of importing third-party FPGA cores even more open and user-friendly, it broadens the capabilities and expands the reach of the system in a significant way. Developers using Altium Designer's vast array of resources to create system functionality and accelerate the design process can now save time and effort if they need or choose to use the core generation facilities of the vendor tools."

Altium Designer is unique in that it is the industry's only electronic product development system that unifies hardware, software and programmable hardware design within a single design environment. This system-level unification of electronics design flows allows engineers to make full use of the potential of high-capacity programmable devices as an embedded systems development platform and approach design in an entirely new way. The 'soft' design methodology enabled by Altium Designer gives engineers the tools to create more intelligent products faster and allows system functionality to remain easily updateable and changeable throughout the development process.

Pricing and availability

Support for third-party FPGA core import, along with many other system enhancements, 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 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 (ASX: ALU) is the industry's 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 is headquartered in Sydney, Australia with sales offices in the United States, Europe, Japan, China, and resellers in all other major markets. For more information, please visit www.altium.com.

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.