User:WikiWriter2345/Altium draft

Altium Limited is an Australian based software company that provides PC-based electronics design software for engineers. Founded in 1985, Altium has headquarters in Sydney and sales offices in the United States, Europe, Japan, China, and resellers in all other major markets.

History
As an electronics designer doing design work at the University of Tasmania in the 1980s, Nick Martin, Altium’s founder and CEO, recognized that his ability to develop electronic designs was limited by the tools currently available. The only way to design printed circuit boards (PCB) was either through a difficult manual process, or by using high-priced software that required expensive mainframe computers.

As the personal computer (PC) started to gain widespread acceptance as a new form of computing, Martin realised that there was an opportunity to make electronics product design affordable by marrying the techniques of electronics design to the PC platform. To pursue this vision, Martin founded what was then Protel in 1985 and launched the company’s first product later that same year. This was an affordable DOS-based printed circuit board (PCB) layout and design tool.

The company continued to develop and release new versions of this PCB design tool, followed by Protel for Windows – the world’s first Microsoft Windows-based PCB design system.

In the mid-1990s, the company saw that electronic products that had once been created using fixed-functionality hardware devices permanently wired together on a PCB were being replaced with programmable hardware running embedded software. In particular, the emergence of field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) in commercial quantities, and at affordable prices, promised new ways of creating electronic products. The barrier to this approach was the demarcation between the design tools that serviced the PCB domain and the design tools that serviced the programmable logic and embedded software domains. Electronic design processes and tools had become compartmentalized to the extent that system integration and the ability to move between design domains (hardware and software) was fast becoming the biggest obstacle to electronics design.

Unifying electronics design
To counter the limitations imposed by separate stand-alone design tools, Altium refocused its sights to developing a unified electronics design system.

The most defining attribute of a unified design system is its use of a single data model that encapsulates all of the design data required to create a product. Even though the design data are stored as multiple files on a disk, a unified design tool treats them collectively as a single entity. This data model is accessed and manipulated during the design of an electronic product. The design processes use a range of different editors which expose different views of the single data set, depending on the activities required.

Altium's unified electronics design environment needed to embrace board layout and design, and includeschematic capture, routing (EDA), test and analysis and FPGA design.

Altium needed to grow its technology beyond the PCB solution that it had previously developed, to support the other electronic design disciplines. It started to acquire the technologies needed to create a unified electronics design solution:


 * Logical Devices (1995)
 * INCASES (1998)
 * MicroCode Engineering (1998)
 * Accolade Design Automation (1999)
 * Green Mountain (1999)
 * Tasking embedded C-compiler (2001)

In 1999 it listed on the Australian Stock Exchange to generate the capital to conclude these acquisitions.

In 2001 it changed the company name to Altium, to distinguish it's products from the earlier Protel PCB layout solutions.

Altium needed to develop a new software architecture that could abstract the data model into a single entity to provide multiple views of that data. Existing platforms were explored, including the open source ECLiPSe environment and Microsoft’s Visual Studio, but neither of these options offered a good technology fit with Altium’s existing code base. For these reasons, Altium created its own platform called Design Explorer (DXP), hosted on Microsoft’s Windows operating system. This platform forms the foundation of Altium Designer and is what makes unified design possible.

Under this design architecture, elements such as the GUI, I/O management (IOMMU), infrastructure services and user licensing, are all managed in a single, unified way.

The first version of what was to become Altium’s unified electronics design solution, Altium Designer, was released in 2004. A major new release followed with Altium Designer 6 in December 2005, and in 2007 and 2008. Altium has now moved to a six-month release cycle.

Products
Altium Limitied distributes the following products:


 * Altium Designer – Altium’s unified electronics design solution.
 * Desktop NanoBoard – Altium’s reconfigurable hardware platform.
 * Innovation Station – The bundled combination of Altium Designer and the Desktop NanoBoard.
 * Tasking – An embedded systems software development tool.
 * P-CAD - discontinued in 2006. Replaced by Altium Designer.
 * Autotrax