Altium previews Protel DXP™ at PCB West

SYDNEY, Australia - March 18, 2002 - Altium Limited (ASX: ALU), a leading developer of Windows-based electronic design and development software, is pleased to announce that the next-generation Protel board-level design product will be named Protel DXP™. The DXP moniker derives from the new version's full exploitation of the power of Altium's proprietary Design Explorer™ technology integration platform.

With Protel DXP, the Design Explorer platform has been re-engineered and significantly enhanced to provide faster application startup and a more responsive and tightly integrated design environment. With this enhanced platform Protel DXP delivers designers a host of new and enhanced PCB features such as topological autorouting, native support for multichannel design and design variants, enhanced error checking and synchronization, and the integration of VHDL design entry. Protel DXP's enhanced PCB features are coupled with a highly optimized Graphical User Interface (GUI) and significant project-management features to provide a design tool that addresses the needs of the PCB design process as a whole, rather than from a point-tool perspective. Protel DXP is being previewed this week at PCB Design Conference West, Santa Clara, CA.

For the DXP release, Protel has been re-engineered so that all system components work as native Design Explorer servers, allowing Protel DXP to work as a single board design application with seamless integration between its different design capabilities. "With Protel DXP, we've made a fundamental architectural change to a software platform that allows seamless integration of all components of the system and has set the foundations for quick and easy expansion," says Nick Martin, Joint CEO and Founder, Altium. "We will now be able to very easily and quickly add new technologies and capabilities to the platform as they are developed. This will greatly benefit our Altium Total Support customers who are entitled to download our latest product releases, program enhancements, technology add-ons, service packs and component libraries free of charge, as we roll them out."

Bringing "project-awareness" to the desktop
Protel DXP is a very "project-aware" release and will be the first product to bring a strong sense of the design process to desktop EDA software. Enhanced design capture capabilities allow for text or schematic-based VHDL documents to be integrated into the board design process, facilitating the use of FPGAs within projects. Designers can freely mix text and schematic-based VHDL design capture and can easily propagate changes such as pin reassignments automatically throughout a project.

Protel DXP will allow engineers and designers unprecedented freedom to move back and forth through the design process, making changes as they go unrestricted by the data integrity and version control issues that this would otherwise bring up. "Altium has long recognized that design tools should work with the natural design process, not against it," says Martin. "With the time-to-market pressures that today's designers are working with, it is no longer practical to rely on a collection of different point tools that are not synchronized, and that don't allow for the flow of the modern design process. It is Altium's philosophy that designers should be able to focus on their designs not their design tools and that their design tools should cater to the natural, nonlinear flow of today's design processes."

Effortless maintenance of data integrity: truly bidirectional synchronization Protel DXP uses a "compilation" paradigm to ensure project integrity. The project compiler combines design and error checking with a powerful comparator engine to ensure full synchronization of both source documents and the target board design. Changes can be propagated both to and from the board design on a per-difference basis, so changes can be made easily at any stage of the design process. This also means that the schematic and PCB documents can be worked on at the same time and then, using the design compiler, changes can be synchronized in both directions.

The advantages of this project-compilation approach are that designers can be sure that their entire design project is error free and synchronized at all stages of the design process, and that multiple and even conflicting changes can be reconciled quickly and easily.

Holistic, integrated board design system
Protel DXP is the culmination of Altium's design-focused approach towards the development of software tools. "The current weaknesses of design tools such as making different tools work together, and moving the design from one tool to another are not addressed by using a selection of fragmented point tools," says Martin. "We believe that these weaknesses are better addressed by a board design system that is fully integrated and takes a holistic approach to the design process. This includes providing all the capabilities needed to take a design from concept to completion, and to manage all stages of the process along the way."

As well as powerful design capture and PCB layout and editing features, Protel DXP integrates SPICE 3f5™compliant circuit simulation and board signal integrity analysis into the system. Circuit simulations can be run directly from a schematic, and signal integrity analysis is fully integrated into the PCB editing environment.

Situs™ - Altium's new Topological Autorouting technology - is also fully integrated into the Protel DXP PCB editing environment. Situs moves beyond traditional rectilinear shape-based routing by adding a topological board-analysis stage to the autorouting process. Situs offers enhanced compliance with the Protel design rule system, control over routing passes and costings, and superb completion rates and finished route quality.

Other major capabilities of the Protel DXP release include:

• Full support for hierarchical multichannel designs
• Support for multiple board variants from a single set of source files
• Support for integrated component libraries that link schematic symbols to footprints, simulation models, signal integrity models, etc.
• Support for major third-party version control systems such as Microsoft Visual SourceSafe
• Enhanced documentation and reporting features

Major GUI improvements
In Protel DXP, Altium has re-designed Protel's GUI with the focus on ease of use, intuitive control, and consistency of interface across all editors. The result is that designers have better and easier access to design data and don't need to spend time learning a new design environment for each stage of the design process. Also, Protel DXP's GUI has been normalized in harmony with the best-practice design for Windows applications with Windows-standard functions, such as "CTRL + scroll wheel" to zoom, drag-and-drop functionality, and standard Microsoft keyboard shortcuts.

Typical of the attention to detail in the interface are features such as:

• Floating toolbars and panels that "fade out" when they are in the way during an editing operation
• Enhanced object selection and global editing using tabular list views that support advanced filtering and sorting
• Graphical object properties dialogs that intuitively illustrate the editable attributes of each object
• Extensive cross probing between editing windows and list panels
• Drag-and-drop toolbar and menu customization

"We have a different approach from many of our competitors, who design tools that require their users to undertake extensive training courses in order to be productive," says Martin. "We believe that focusing on ease of use and intuitive interface design will benefit our customers because they can spend less time learning the software before they gain the benefits of access to the powerful features."

With the release of Protel DXP, Altium continues to break down barriers to innovation and technological advancement by providing every engineer, designer and developer with easy access to the best possible design tools.

Protel and Protel DXP logos
The new "Protel" and "Protel DXP" logos are descendants of the former Protel and Protel 99 SE logos, yet have been modified to reflect Protel's new position as a product brand under the recently formed Altium corporate brand. With the introduction of these new logos, Protel's identity takes on a fresh lime green as the predominant branding and logo color theme ™ inspired by the hue of a printed circuit board, and complimentary to the blue of the Altium logo. The new Protel logotype is linked closely with its predecessor and retains the distinctive slash through the 'o', yet reflects its place in the Altium family through the introduction of a rounded 'P', and a 't' with simplified crossbar.

PCB West details
Altium will be previewing Protel DXP at PCB Design Conference West as well as giving information and live demos of all of its PCB products, including Protel and P-CAD. For Protel users, there will also be an interactive user group meeting that will give an overview of the new features and enhancements in the new release. PCB Design Conference West is being held in the Santa Clara Convention Center, Santa Clara, CA, USA, from March 18 to 22. Altium's booth number is 412.

Availability
Pricing is expected to be in line with the current Protel product, which will be confirmed at the time of release, as will further details about shipping dates.

Customers can purchase the current Protel product Protel 99 SE™ which comes with 12 months free membership to Altium Total Support (valued at US$1,995), thereby guaranteeing they receive Protel DXP free of charge as soon as it is released.

For more product information, visit www.protel.com or contact your local Altium Sales and Support Center.

About Altium Limited
Altium Limited (ASX: ALU), trading as Protel International Limited (ASX: PRI) prior to August 6, 2001, is a leading global developer and supplier of desktop Electronic Design Automation (EDA) and embedded software design tools for the Microsoft Windows environment.

Since the Company's foundation in 1985 and its release of the world's first Microsoft Windows-based EDA tool in 1991, Altium has continued to apply the most advanced software design methods to provide powerful, easy-to-use and affordable design software to engineers and electronics designers worldwide.

Altium's current product brands include Protel, P-CAD, TASKING, Accolade, CircuitMaker and CAMtastic!. These products offer tailored solutions covering a range of hardware and software design processes.

Altium is headquartered in Sydney, Australia, and operates a number of sales and support offices in Australia, the United States, Japan and Europe as well as maintaining a large reseller network in all other major markets. More information about the Company and its products and services may be obtained from our website at www.altium.com.

March 18, 2002 Altium USA Media Contact

Janice Hughes
Hughes Communications, Inc.
15 Oak Tree Lane
Lyme, CT 06371
USA
Telephone: +1 860 434 3782
Fax: +1 860 434 3781
Email: janice@hughescom.net

Corporate Media Contact

Jessica Maxwell
Altium Limited
Level 3, 12a Rodborough Road Frenchs Forest, NSW 2086
Australia
http://www.altium.com
Telephone: +61 2 9975 7710
Fax: +61 2 9975 7720
Email: jessica.maxwell@altium.com.au

Altium, Altium Total Support, Protel, Protel DXP, Design Explorer, nVisage, P-CAD, TASKING, Accolade, CircuitMaker, CAMtastic!, Situs and Topological Autorouting and their respective logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of Altium Limited. All other registered or unregistered trademarks referenced herein are the property of their respective owners, and no trademark rights to the same are claimed.