Altium Designer Blog: 2010

Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Altium Designer 10 release date announced

Altium has announced the date that it will ship the next release of Altium Designer: 31 January 2011.

There are many things to get excited about in this new release, but in a nutshell, it changes how you manage component and design data, and take products from design to manufacture.

Visit the new Altium Designer website - ad10.altium.com - for regular updates on Altium Designer 10 and its capabilities between now and release date.

Friday, October 8, 2010

Morfik and Altium

Morfik and Altium

With Morfik Version 3 and Altium Designer Release 10, both companies have reached their next inflection point. At this point we have chosen to join forces to pursue the next stage. We believe that together Altium and Morfik can empower those who choose to develop the device-based ecosystems that will be needed.

The three pillars of this are:

Device Design – Designing smart connected devices that make up the physical structure of the ecosystem. PCs, Servers and “Application Specific” devices. This is the traditional business of Altium.
Cloud/Web Application Design – The Web-Apps that will run across the “Sea of Devices”. This is the business of Morfik.
Infrastructure - the Internet-based resources that the devices and web-applications run on. This is new for the Internet era, but is becoming available on an industrial scale from people like Amazon.

The second of these three pillars is where Morfik and Altium intersect – The development of web-based applications.

Morfik is clearly the provider of the technology for web-applications. Although this has been historically focused on serving solutions to browsers in PCs, with Morfik 3 this has moved to more direct support for iPads and iPhones. These are still general purpose personal computers but they are the first step in moving beyond the PC-based browser.

The community of expertise that has developed around Morfik and its technology is a precious resource for this undertaking. We see the Morfik customer base today (something that we would like to see grow significantly) as an important starting point for the evolution of a community of web-application developers who can develop the web-applications that are an important part of these future ecosystems.

As a technology that provides a true object-oriented software-engineered approach to web-app development, Morfik is unique in the world. Engineering these ecosystems is not something that will be accomplished by the script-based approaches so common in the web-world today. It will take real software engineers and real software engineering to build these.

For those who see Morfik as a way to develop their own PC-based web-apps today (most Morfik customers today), we would hope you will stick around and work with us as we undertake the next stage of this journey. At the very least you will be able to benefit from the work we intend to do – work which we hope will take Morfik’s web-application development model to the next level.

And for those who are keen to be part of this next stage, designing web-applications that power these ecosystems, I hope that you find the prospects for the future as exciting as we do.

To read the complete article

http://blog.morfik.com/2010/10/08/morfik-and-altium/

Thursday, September 16, 2010

Altium formally announced its intent to buy Morfik Technology

Altium formally announced its intent to buy Morfik Technology to the market this morning Sydney time.

You can read the announcement to the Australian Securities Exchange and the media release in the Investor and Media sections of our web site.

Morfik is an Australian software company whose products are used by professional software engineers to design, engineer and deploy cloud-based software applications.

Our plan is to merge our development teams and our respective technologies as part of the long term plan of helping our industry make the transition from designing stand-alone discrete devices to designing and engineering connected device ecosystems. This is something we’ve talked about, and been developing, for a few years now.

We can now accelerate the development of this platform for Altium’s customers. When developed, this platform will form the basis of the tools and infrastructure required to help electronics designers develop their own ecosystems of intelligent, connected devices, running their own cloud-based applications.

All members of Morfik’s team will be joining Altium, including the team in Sydney and Hobart, in Australia, and in Kiev, in the Ukraine. Morfik’s co-founders and senior developers will remain with Altium, which provides us with an outstanding group of experts to complement our home-grown team.

The merging of our development teams also lets us refocus and re-task our combined development of the forthcoming release of Altium Designer. And while we complete the acquisition, we are planning to move quickly on creating the web presence for our new content stream. This is in turn based on the package system that will be part of the new release of Altium Designer. To accelerate this process we are moving to get our teams working together as quickly as possible so that we can jointly attack the objectives ahead.

Nick Martin's white paper, published last year, sets the scene. Read it here: http://altium.com/files/pdfs/WhatsNextForElectronicsDevicesWhitePaper.pdf.

Friday, September 3, 2010

Altium Release 10 Schedule

The excitement around Release 10 is building with an expected delivery in early October. In support of the upcoming release, a number of activities are focused on highlighting the industry leading technology in Release 10.

One of my favorites is the webinar titled "Add WiFi or 3G to an FPGA Design in One Hour!. With Release 10, WiFi and 2G/3G are made simple additions to your design.

Altium's Technology Update Roadshow
Beginning in September, Altium will take to the road to bring you its latest technology face-to-face in 12 cities. Meet with the technologist in a fun venue and learn about Altium's industry leading technology. This will become an annual Fall event. City by City Schedule & Registration >
NEW Technology Webinar Series
With Release 10 around the corner, there is a new series of live webinars highlighting some of the cool technology that includes PCB Release Management, team based PCB design and 2G/3G design. All important topics in today's design processes. Register Here >
Add WiFi or 3G to Your FPGA Design
Altium combines FPGA design , IP and a development board in a way that makes adding a WiFi or 3G function easy. Add a WiFi USB connection in minutes and verify it on the NanoBoard 3000. Altium's platform based design solution makes the difference! Learn More >
NEW Services Offering
Altium is pleased to introduce a services offering to enable new users to adopt and maximize productivity faster. The offering will be package based that will make it more cost effective for our customers. More details to follow in the coming days.

Monday, May 31, 2010

Altium Designer Release 10

There's a lot going on at Altium right now they are preparing the next release of Altium Designer to market, we want to provide previews of what's coming. This new information website provides early glimpses of the forthcoming release.

Preview videos for Altiuum Designer Release 10 - http://altium.com/release10/

We've also created a second webinar on our new smart data management technology. You can find details of where to watch this, on demand or live in your region, here...

High Integrity Release - http://altium.com/smart-data-management/

Tuesday, March 2, 2010

Altium Designer Winter10

Beta test are complete for Winter10 and will be released in the next few weeks. No date has been set yet.

Monday, March 1, 2010

Virtual PCB

Virtual PCB (virtual-pcb.com) -- the industry’s only fully interactive, Web-based trade show for PCB designers, fabricators and assemblers -- will be held March 2 - 4, 2010. Virtual PCB brings together buyers and sellers from around the world at a fraction of the cost of traditional events and trade shows.

View the latest Technical Content

As an attendee, you can:

Attend free technical Webinars
Download literature, white papers and product brochures
View company and product videos
Participate in private attendee-to-attendee and attendee-to-exhibitor communications
Tour all exhibitor booths and sessions
Attend live, scheduled group chats with industry experts

All from the comfort of your office or home!

Friday, February 26, 2010

Next Generation Design Data Management

Manually managing bills of materials? Struggling to manage design revisions? Dread the design release documentation nightmare? Let’s face it: Design data management is not the most glamorous part of the engineering workday. However, effective data management and collaboration throughout the organization can have a huge impact on your success in taking products to market more quickly and with fewer revisions. If this sounds desirable, you are in the right place! This free webinar will reveal the secrets to creating a pushbutton design data management system.

In an hour, you'll learn about:

• Management of design configurations, including assembly and fabrication variants.

• Data versioning and revision management with version control.

• Release management and just how to develop a bulletproof release process that yields high-quality, consistent results every time.

• Component management and how to manage parts information across the entire organization.

• And more!

http://www.altium.com/altium/altiumsite/events/en/febwebinar.cfm