More performance, more logic and more options for FPGA designers

Electronics designers use Altium Designer to target either the FPGA of choice (Altium Designer now supports over 60), or a range of alternatives to compare performance, power consumption, and other design parameters. Designers have design flexibility without the encumbrances associated with also having to choose multiple vendor development software. Electronics designers can change programmable devices during development without significant software or hardware rework. Crucial design decisions can remain open until much later in the design cycle, allowing more experimentation and more opportunities for innovation.

“Continuing to increase the number of devices we support in Altium Designer lets electronics designers explore more of the cost and performance benefits of today’s programmable devices,” said Matt Schwaiger, Senior Vice President Global Customer Success, Altium. “FPGAs such as the Xilinx Spartan-6 – which offers more logic and more performance at lower cost – are becoming pervasive. And electronics designers without any prior experience can use Altium’s design solutions to develop entire systems based on an FPGA using their board design skills.

“They can do this because of Altium Designer’s unified architecture and high level of abstraction. Board designers can enter the FPGA space and use Altium’s graphical interface to develop intelligent and connected FPGA-based electronics. This lets them manage the entire electronics design process within a single system.”

As Xilinx devices have evolved, so too has Altium Designer, enabling electronics designers, with little knowledge of FPGAs, to harness the capabilities found in devices like our new 45nm Spartan-6 FPGA family, Tom Feist, Senior Marketing Director, Xilinx, Inc., said. The Spartan-6 FPGA family delivers an optimal balance of low risk, low cost, and low power for cost-sensitive applications, while featuring an intelligent mix of hard IP and programmability for greater integration, such as 3.125 Gb/s transceivers and integrated PCI Express endpoint blocks.