Addressing the needs of embedded engineers at electronica
2 mins read
Software is a fundamental part of developing today's electronic devices. It's intimately related to the underlying hardware, yet traditional hardware design environments ignore its existence. At Altium we believe that software design should be a core element of the design system.
Unlike conventional tool chains where software development and FPGA design are tackled using separate, disconnected applications, we've been focused on getting embedded hardware and software development inside a single design environment.
Writing and debugging application software, implementing the code on programmable hardware and testing the combined result are all performed within one design system, without the need for complex exchanges of design data between applications.
Because Altium Designer employs a single model of the design data, any changes in the hardware domain will automatically propagate to the embedded design space.
With this architecture in place as a backbone for our customers' engineering environment, we use the unified data model to care for another urgent need in the engineering community: management of design data, which includes various design disciplines during the whole design process all the way through to manufacturing.
Independent market surveys show that leading electronic design companies that have formally implemented workflows around data management, ECAD/MCAD integration, PCB/FPGA co-design or design re-use gain significant competitive advantages. Altium Designer lets us provide a unified tool to our customers, allowing them to implement out of the box solutions in those areas and let them achieve their goals more successfully.
On the tool side, we see the strong need to provide efficient tools for tasks like sharing libraries between users and to integrate version control for an auditable track of design changes. Tools and methodologies for design re-use from the very beginning are also very crucial in order to enable repeatable and controllable design release and test processes to create error free manufacturing data with no need to rely on emails back and forth.
Besides providing pure design functionality within the design tool, we will continue to create systems which help designers early in the design phase to make intelligent decisions when choosing the components for their design. Apart from the functionality of a device, there are different aspects which are equally important and might make the difference between a winning or losing product.
Therefore information about lead time, availability, cost, second source, alternatives as well as design intelligence such as successful usage of a component/circuitry in former designs will be needed in the design environment. Having these data early in the design process makes the design re-use much more efficient. We see different ways how such information can be provided. Web based applications are of course very well suited to provide real time supply chain information about components. This is why we extend both functionality and content in our online platform AltiumLive.
Over the last couple of months for example we have been releasing more than 100,000 design ready components - visible in AltiumLive and directly accessible from within the design environment as well - so those components can be placed in a design project with a single mouse click - with all data needed to drive the project through to manufacturing.
