Software focus drives Altium's ambition

LONDON — EDA company Altium Ltd. has carved out its own niche in the design tool community by integrating its software with in-house developed hardware platforms that are based on a variety of field programmable gate arrays. But this integrated approach could just be a transitional phase according to Altium founder and CEO, Nick Martin.

Founded in 1985 as Protel, the Australia-headquartered company established a niche in low-cost PCB design software sector but made its big move after an initial public offering of shares in 1999 provided funds to make company and technology acquisitions. This enabled the company to enter the FPGA design and synthesis market in 2000, and the embedded software development market in 2001.

As a natural result the renamed company shifted its focus to system design based around FPGAs.“We realized the platforms that were out there had conceptual configurability but they did not have the physical configurability,” said Martin pictured right). “If you bought a FPGA development board it had a standard set of peripherals that were all hard wired. To me this was really missing the point, as you want to be able to plug a device in and then replace it and have the software change to fit the design together.”

During the first half of the decade the company released a plethora of products around this idea, eventually combining many of these into the Altium Designer software in 2005 and the Nexar vendor-independent system for developing complete processor-based digital systems on FPGAs. This has evolved into the NanoBoard plug-in hardware offering, which now provides support for devices from Xilinx, Altera, Actel and Lattice.

The advantage of “soft design,” according to Martin, is that you can not only configure the system in software but you can also compare the performance of different devices and do a trade-off of power and performance. “All the IP we supply to do system-based design is pre-synthesized for the different families of FPGAs. Within our system all the IP and software code can be moved between different devices,” added Martin.