Unified development environment support for FPGAs

The Altium Designer 6 unified electronic product development solution now supports the Cyclone III field-programmable gate array (FPGA) device family from Altera.

Altium's unified electronic product development solution - Altium Designer 6 - now supports the newly introduced Cyclone III field-programmable gate array (FPGA) device family from Altera Corporation.

This move allows engineers to use the low-cost Cyclone III devices to develop electronics systems using the full power of Altium Designer's unified design environment.

"We've long seen that the future of electronic product development lies in making use of the full potential of programmable logic technology to accelerate hardware and software design, allowing more innovative products to be developed faster", comments Nick Martin, Altium's Founder and Chief Executive Officer.

"Devices such as Altera's Cyclone III FPGAs enable developers of electronic products to use programmable devices across a wider range of applications".

Altium Designer is the first system to bring together hardware, software and programmable hardware design within a single, unified design environment.

In doing so, Altium Designer accelerates electronic product design and opens up new possibilities for design innovation by enabling hardware and software engineers - regardless of their level of FPGA design experience - easily to exploit the potential of programmable devices.

Altium is expanding the wide range of programmable devices already supported by Altium Designer with the addition of the Cyclone III family.

Engineers using the system can easily target any supported device during development, eliminating the need to change development platforms or purchase additional software and specific device support modules.

Altium Designer's unified design environment also allows designers to retarget the programmable hardware elements of a design to a range of different processor platforms, both FPGA-hosted and discrete, during development without significant software or hardware rework.

This means that crucial application architecture decisions can remain open and easily changeable until much later in the development cycle than currently possible.

For full embedded systems development, Altium Designer includes an extensive set of ready-to-use 'soft' components that can be used to target a wide range of programmable devices, including the Altera Cyclone III device.

Developers can also easily implement processors, such as the Altera Nios II embedded processor (already fully supported by Altium Designer) and Altium Designer's TSK3000 soft-core RISC processor, within any suitably sized Cyclone series device.

"Our Cyclone series of devices have been customer-defined to service the growing need for low-cost programmable technology, and the Cyclone III family takes this to new heights", says Danny Biran, Vice President of Product and Corporate Marketing at Altera.

"Altium's prompt support for the Cyclone III family, and its focus on helping electronics designers harness the power of programmable logic to drive the development of innovative products, complements our market-expansion goals that are behind this new, low-power, high-functionality, low-cost device family".

Support for the new Altera Cyclone III family is now available with the latest software update for Altium Designer 6 - Altium Designer 6.7.

All Altium Designer 6 license holders can download this update for free.

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