Altium ties EDA/FPGA knots tighter

Somewhere between the broadening of GateRocket’s product line and the significant number of verification tools using FPGAs that showed up at DAC 2009, EDA companies decided to tighten their links to FPGA brethren. No longer was it enough to help in design and simulation tools for larger FPGAs, but a direct offering of FPGA kits for evaluation became the talk of EDA leaders. The latest proof positive of this principle is Altium Ltd’s expansion of its NanoBoard program.

Altium’s interest in mainstreaming EDA stems from its days of developing PCB design software that ran on a PC instead of Unix workstation. Its flagship Altium Designer product has always focused on FPGAs as the primary programmable semicustom tool for the average designer. The direct offering of an FPGA kit began with NanoBoard 2, which offered an FPGA on a daughter card to design and debug a system design.

Altium touts the NanoBoard 3000 as a more radical product, essentially an “out of the box” design environment with royalty-free IP. The purchase price of $395 gains the designer access to a copy of Altium Designer (for FPGAs, not for boards), and selected IP cores. Altium’s marketing model is that designers may start with a purely soft design process, use NanoBoard to debug prototypes, and move on to license a board-level Altium Designer in the final stages.

The system offers significant utility for experienced designers, but it can also attract those with no Verilog or VHDL experience. First products are based on the Xilinx Spartan-3AN, though Altium will offer Altera and Lattice products too. In fact, this is an area where the new generation of NanoBoard sports a strength and a weakness. In NanoBoard 2, developers could swap out their brands of FPGAs at will, by changing daughter cards. Because NanoBoard 3000 is a tight link of FPGA, software, and IP, users must purchase a board specific to one FPGA architecture.

It will be interesting to see how widely this model of FPGA prototype distribution is copied within the EDA community. There will always be a high-end audience using advanced behavioral simulation and verification tools for which the ability to offer FPGA devices will not be important. For the rest of us, the Altium model may come into wide use.