Daughterboards add latest FPGA support

An Altium product story

Edited by the Electronicstalk editorial team May 12, 2004

Two new daughterboards will enable engineers using the Nexar development system to interactively develop entire processor-based digital systems on Altera Stratix and Xilinx Virtex-II FPGAs.

Two new daughterboards will enable engineers using Altium's Nexar development system to directly and interactively develop entire processor-based digital systems on Altera's Stratix and Xilinx's Virtex-II FPGAs.

These new daughterboards plug into a unique FPGA-based development board that Altium calls a NanoBoard (nano-level breadboard), an essential part of Altium's LiveDesign methodology of interactive, real-time development and debugging of FPGA-based designs.

The swappable nature of the different daughterboards available for Altium's NanoBoard enables Altium to offer an FPGA vendor-independent solution for embedded system design that allows users to change the FPGA they are developing or implementing their designs on just by plugging in a different daughter board.

"Nexar users can simply recompile their existing projects to take advantage of the capacity and features of Stratix and Virtex-II FPGAs", said Nick Martin, Joint CEO and founder, Altium.

Martin continued: "To ensure Nexar customers have a wide variety of target devices to choose from we will continue to progressively roll-out daughter boards for popular FPGAs and related devices.

We currently have Virtex-II Pro, Spartan 3 and Max II boards under development, with more to follow.

Since we house all of the target programmable devices on plug-in daughterboards, our NanoBoard also gives engineers the freedom to easily change the target project architecture, providing the industry's only FPGA vendor-independent FPGA development environment".

Altium's NanoBoard is currently delivered with two daughterboards included - the Xilinx Spartan-IIE and the Altera Cyclone daughter boards - for US $995.

The Altera Stratix and Xilinx Virtex-II daughterboards are available for purchase separately at US $495 each.

However, as part of a current offer, customers that purchase a full Nexar licence before 30th June 2004 get their choice of one of the two new daughterboards free.