Altium Limited

A major contributor to this article appears to have a conflict of interest with its subject. It may require cleanup to comply with Wikipedia's content policies, particularly neutral point of view. Please discuss further on the talk page. (March 2009)

Altium Limited is an Australian based software company that provides PC-based electronics design software for engineers. Founded in 1985, Altium has headquarters in Sydney and sales offices in the United States, Europe, Japan, China, and resellers in all other major markets.

History

Nicholas Martin, an electronics designer doing design work at the University of Tasmania in the 1980s, recognized that the ability to design printed circuit boards was limited by the tools currently available - either through a difficult manual process, or by using high-priced software that required expensive mainframe computers. With the development of the personal computer, Martin realised that there was an opportunity to make electronics product design affordable by marrying the techniques of electronics design to the PC platform and, in 1985, founded Protel, launching the company’s first product later that same year - a DOS-based printed circuit board (PCB) layout and design tool.

The company continued to develop and release new versions of this design tool, followed by Protel for Windows – the world’s first Microsoft Windows-based PCB design system.^[1]

Unifying electronics design

In the mid-1990s, the industry was moving towards the use of newly-affordable technologies such as field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) instead of individual components fixed to a PCB^[2], however the design tools used for PCBs and those used for programmable logic systems were markedly different and the difference was becoming an obstacle to electronics design^[3].

To counter the limitations imposed by separate stand-alone design tools, the company began developing a unified electronics design system, which uses a single data model to hold all of the design data required to create a product. A variety of editing tools could then be used to access and manipulate the design, covering areas such as board layout and design, schematic capture, routing (EDA), testing, analysis and FPGA design.^[4]

In the second half of the 1990s, the company began acquisition of various companies with the technologies needed to create a unified electronics design solution. In 1999 it listed on the Australian Stock Exchange to generate the capital to conclude these acquisitions.^[5], and in 2001, the company changed its name to Altium, to distinguish its products from the earlier Protel PCB layout solutions.

Due to the limitations of existing software platforms, Altium created its own platform called Design Explorer (DXP), hosted on Microsoft’s Windows operating system, which formed the foundation of the Altium Designer product. The first version was released in 2004, with major new releases in December 2005, and in 2007 and 2008. Altium has now moved to a six-month release cycle.

Products

• Altium Designer – unified electronics design solution.
• Desktop NanoBoard – reconfigurable hardware platform.
• Innovation Station – a bundled combination of Altium Designer and the Desktop NanoBoard.
• Tasking – An embedded systems software development tool.
• Autotrax

See also

• List of EDA companies
• Electronics
• Electronic engineering
• FPGAs
• Embedded Systems
• List of companies of Australia

References

Further reading

• Courtemanche, Meredith (2008-07-11). "From the editor: The Human BOM". SMT. http://smt.pennnet.com/Articles/Article_Display.cfm?ARTICLE_ID=331176&p=35. Retrieved on 2009-03-04. 
• Maxfield, Clive (2008-07-07). "Software focus drives Altium’s ambition". EDA DeignLine. http://www.edadesignline.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=208802874. Retrieved on 2009-03-04. 
• Maxfield, Clive (2008-02-05). "Altium launch Innovation Station featuring the Desktop NanoBoard". Programmable Logic DesignLine. http://www.pldesignline.com/206104574;jsessionid=GMZRO2WDNOADAQSNDLRSKHSCJUNN2JVN?printableArticle=true. Retrieved on 2009-03-04. 
• Morris, Kevin (2007-11-27). "Altium Goes 3D - Board Design Can Be Fun". FPGA & Structured ASIC Journal. http://www.fpgajournal.com/articles_2007/20071127_3d.htm. Retrieved on 2009-03-04. 
• Miller, Nick (2007-10-30). "Altium's altitude attitude". Sydney Morning Herald. http://www.smh.com.au/news/biztech/altiums-altitude-attitude/2007/10/29/1193618795935.html. Retrieved on 2009-03-04. 
• Goering, Richard (2006-11-14). "Altium links pc-boards with mechanical CAD". EDA DeignLine. http://www.edadesignline.com/products/194400033. Retrieved on 2009-03-04. 

External links

• Official Site