Anablog

When I wrote up my blog post about Altium circuit board layout software I had not received confirmation that the $995 competitive upgrade for their schematic package included the Spice solver as well as signal integrity. Since then Mathew Berggren, a “customer success manager” that I worked with 6 years ago wrote me back and told me that yes, the $995 deal does give you a schematic package that does Spice as well as predicting signal integrity. Not surprisingly, the $995 package cannot accept layout information from whatever arbitrary software you use and then do 2-d field solving the way Mentor Graphics Hyperlynx does. For that you would need the complete package, but he told me they have reduced the price on that from about $10 grand to $4 grand. He also mentioned that you can just lease a license for $195 a month, something that a commenter to my last blog pointed out and said he loved. I wrote back and asked Matt permission to block-quote his email to me:

To your questions...Yes, the new $995 price includes Spice and pre-layout Signal Integrity analysis (basically an SI engine that can look at terminations, slew rates, drive strengths, etc, and model them against an average track impedance (i.e. not using the full board copper). For $3995 you can get the whole boat so to speak, and includes a year's software assurance (covers you for upgrades for a year). Better still, you can now purchase the full boat on a monthly lease arrangement for <pause> $195 / mo. with support. We also dropped the uplift for the Floating License with this forthcoming release so what was the industry standard 20% uplift is gone as far as we're concerned. "But wait, there's more" ...We're also pushing for total transparency in pricing so everyone can see our prices (there's no 'man behind the curtain') and the features included are not some cut-down version of the full product. Instead, we're going all-out with everything we have, whether that's schematic, PCB, FPGA development, embedded software development, soft-hardware / hardware / software IP, SPICE, SI, CAM, and all the other enterprise stuff we do well...It all comes out of the box.

So, some thoughts on this shift...As a company, it feels like we're getting back a part of our identity and getting back in touch with what motivated us develop these sorts of tools to begin with. Recall, the prices, way back pre-1985 when this ship left port, were off the charts. Just as well, the tools were complicated, cumbersome, required special hardware...And, as the story goes, we began as a company motivated to change all of that. And though we certainly changed much of this with some fundamental changes to the design paradigm, the way we bundle features, our prices; like everyone else, our prices began to creep. And bottom line, that creep challenges everything we'd set out to do.

At my core, the Altium mantra I've come to witness is: We want to build tools that help engineers be creative. Tools that help people be innovative. Tools for the widest range of engineers. We want to make the tools accessible to the widest audience and we want to be honest with ourselves and our customers about what they're buying, what's included, what our intentions are, and how we price our solutions.

I can't express just how real this is. It'll sound contrived and probably like the ramblings of just another marketer but having moved here (to Sydney) I have the honor of working with the guys that started the company and I can honestly say, it's real. If we can, we'll continue to operate like a start-up with the same sort of nimbleness, entrepreneurial spirit, creativity, and willingness to explore and at times take risks. The shift in pricing is certainly evidence of this. But this is what sets us apart from the 800-pound gorillas (goliaths?) in our path. We have the wherewithal to create meaningful, substantial, and remarkable innovations that help engineers do their jobs better, and in less time. And pound for pound our development team is beyond compare. We have exceedingly high standards for the sorts of folks we bring into development but those standards just might not jive with what the big corporate EDA companies expect. Sure, we could line our cubes with "coders" or "technicians" but I'd say we've done an amazing job resisting this in favor of the sorts of folks that'll really live this stuff...In engineering we know the difference between the two. It's that back of the envelope RF guru that just "gets it".

I wrote Matt back asking if the $3995/$195 a month deal had FPGA coding included, something that Altium incorporated in the last few years. He responded:

And yes, you get the whole shebang...Schematic, PCB, Spice, FPGA, embedded, SI, CAM, libraries (>80K parts with 3D models, FPs, etc.) -- under $4K.

So there you have it, let’s hope that all the mid-range CAD companies start lowing their prices and adding features like Altium has done. And that brings up an interesting point about whether Altium should be considered mid-range like Orcad and PADS. The ability to do signal integrity as well as the other features is certainly pushing Altium into the capabilities of a high-end product like Allegro or BoardStation/Expedition. This reminds me of the concept of disruptive technology explained in the book The Innovator’s Dilemma. The Harvard professor who wrote that book observed that big companies get knocked off their perch by smaller companies selling disruptive products or using disruptive marketing. The big companies always dismiss the disruptive competitors with phrases like “Oh the hydraulic steam shovel can only hold a few cubic yards as opposed to our cable steam shovel.” Or “Oh, the mini-mill only makes crappy rebar not automotive quality steel.” Or “Oh, Conner only sells little disk drives that won’t hold as much as our 9-inch model.” Well pretty soon a new market is found (laptops for Conner) or the disruptive products become capable enough to push the established products off of the top of the heap. The big companies often try to copy the disruptive model but usually fail. They are used to being the leader and they just can’t successfully catch up.

I think the disruptive market for circuit board layout tools is the modern engineer. This is the engineer that does not have a draftsman handy to do schematic entry and does not have a full-time layout person to do the board layout. We analog engineers have led the way here since we want the schematic drawn correctly and so much depends on board placement and layout that it is easier and quicker to just do it ourselves. PADS, Orcad, and Altium are suited to this market because the products were all developed for PCs not mainframes or PDP-11s. All the mid-range products are also much more intuitive and easier to use for a casual user, like when an engineer has to pick it up once every few months as opposed to using it 8 hours a day every day of her life.

So now we are seeing Altium trying to approach the capabilities of the high-end, or so called enterprise-level PCB CAD tools, while slashing the price to a level a lot closer to the hobby/lower capability tools like Eagle. This will make for some interesting times, that is for sure. I have not done a board in years but my perception of the board packages are that Orcad had a perfect blend with PSPICE and the old Massteck router they bought, combined with the best schematic package. They had the best suite, but have not really improved it since sending the codebase to India. (Now they have stopped supporting and selling Orcad Layout and want to push you into Orcad Editor, a stripper Allegro.) But PADS was always ahead on the actual capabilities of the layout tool which is why so many people do the schematic in Orcad and layout the board in PADS. Protel, the antecedent of Altium was pretty and clever, but buggy and crashed a lot. Eagle has the very special capability to run under Linux as well as Windows along with a very low price. ProCAD, the first package I ever bought, Pulsonix and CADSTAR all have their own passionate users.

So you can see what Altium is doing. They are trying to grab people who love Eagle by lowering their price to a couple octaves above Eagle as opposed to a decade more expensive. This also appeals to the folks that like the free layout tools like ExpressPCB. Those kind of people buying Altium can rest assured that once they learn the tool, it can support them no matter if they have a complex layout or need to do an FPGA. On the high end, Altium is threatening Cadence and Mentor by offering signal integrity as well as 3D board viewing along with very good library creation tools. When I worked at National Semiconductor we evaluated several mid-range packages and one thing about Altium that was very appealing was they supported a concept called Snippets. You could have a schematic chuck that was associated with a layout chunk. When you dropped that snippet into your design, the parts all renumbered and the layout of the snippet stayed routed. That had great appeal because National understood how cool it would be if the power supply guys had their snippets and the signal guys had their snippets and the interface guys had their snippets, well you could get a huge head start and lower your risk by just plopping a bunch of different snippets into your design and wiring them together.

Now don’t expect the other board design software companies to sit still. I suspect that Orcad and PADS will respond with pricing incentives and if you need Linux, well nothing is going to get you off of Eagle. Where Cadence and Mentor are in a bind may be because they don’t want their midrange tools to cannibalize the enterprise stuff in capability. That may also be a problem for CADSTAR and Zuken. Zuken owns the high-end Japanese market, but they bought the English outfit CADSTAR as a mid-range product. Altium does not have this problem; they don’t have an enterprise-level product. My pals and I used to call Altium the PCB CAD elephant graveyard. It seemed all the less-popular packages went there to die. PCAD, Tango and a couple others all got snapped up. We figured that Protel was just another elephant lumbering off to Australia. Well it turns out that Altium has had a strategy this whole time and it is a disruptive one at that. Stay tuned; the coming year should be pretty exciting for users of PCB software. Heck we just learned the cool term “uplift” for tacking on a price increase for a floating license. I love that kind of talk…