NASA selects Altium Designer as electronic design standard

29th October 2007

Altium Limited

ES Admin

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Altium Limited, the developer of unified electronic product development solutions, has announced that NASA’s Johnson Space Center (JSC) has chosen Altium Designer as its standard electronics design software. The Center’s Engineering Directorate will use Altium Designer as its electronics design standard on both manned and unmanned mission support. These include the Space Shuttle and International Space Station programs, as well as the Constellation program to send astronauts back to the Moon.

More specifically, Altium Designer will be used on disciplines as varied as guidance and navigation, electrical power systems, avionics systems, instrumentation, thermal protection, spacesuits and other extravehicular activity (EVA) equipment, aerodynamics and related disciplines, advanced automation systems, and overall systems engineering and simulation.

Over thirty Altium Designer unified licenses will be used at JSC to develop NASA’s signal integrity, simulation, layout and FPGA processes, unifying these several disparate disciplines within Altium’s unified electronics design environment.

Influencing the Center’s choice of Altium Designer was the need to unify the various design disciplines, and help improve design flow efficiencies and the performance of completed designs. The Center is also transferring its legacy designs to Altium Designer.

Being able to protect this intellectual property and past design investment, and reuse or modify designs, were important factors in the decision to move to Altium Designer. The Center is also using Altium Designer to improve configuration management and version control.

”The Johnson Space Center is embarking on some of the most ambitious space programs of our time, and we are delighted that NASA has chosen Altium Designer to help make these visions for space exploration a reality,” comments Nick Martin, founder and CEO, Altium Limited. “Altium is helping engineers around the world tap the benefits of unified electronics design and take advantage of today’s advanced electronics technology. It’s gratifying that an organization of the caliber and reputation of the Johnson Space Center is seeing that a unified approach to electronics design can overcome design barriers characteristic of traditional point tools.”

After a lengthy evaluation of available electronic computer aided design tools, JSC Engineering selected the Altium tool suite,” said Matt Lemke, chief of the electronic design and development branch in NASA’s engineering department. “We are excited about this new relationship with Altium, and we are looking forward to using this state-of-the-art product to improve our configuration management and reduce our design time cycle.