New plug and play options for Altium's Innovation Station

Venice, Florida — Last week at ESC, in California's Silicon Valley, Altium showed a range of new FPGA daughter boards and additional plug-in peripheral boards for the Altium Innovation Station. The Altium Innovation Station provides a high level of design abstraction, which allows all designers, even those with limited or no FPGA design experience, to use the potential of programmable devices. For example, they can create functionality by graphically linking ready-to-use functional blocks together. And they can accelerate application execution by transparently moving C-level software functions into dynamically generated FPGA hardware.

The new daughter boards have the following programmable devices:

• Xilinx® Virtex^TM-5
• Xilinx Spartan^TM-3AN
• Xilinx Spartan^TM-3A DSP
• Actel® ProASIC3

Altium is also expanding its range of peripheral boards, to include the following:

• 6-channel, single-sized, multi-network interface power control and monitoring board
• 12-channel, double-sized, multi-network interface power control and monitoring board
• Audio/video board targeted at AV connectivity with Apple-compatible VGA-style interface, iPod-compatible AV ports, and composite video in/out
• Quad-band GSM and GPS board
• Bluetooth, Zigbee and 802.11 wireless board.

These add to the Compact flash/ATA/SD board, USB/IrDA/Ethernet board and double-sized VGA/Composite/S-Video board that come standard with the Desktop NanoBoard.

The Altium Innovation Station, consisting of Altium Designer and the Desktop NanoBoard (with three standard peripheral boards and a choice of one FPGA daughter board), is available from US$4,300.