SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA -- (MARKET WIRE) -- Jan 18, 2006 --
Altium Limited (ASX: ALU), a leading
developer of Windows-based electronics design software, today announced
that Altium Designer 6.0, the latest version of its unified electronic
product development system, includes full support for embedded designs
using the Xilinx® MicroBlaze FPGA-based soft processor. This allows
developers using Xilinx FPGAs and the Xilinx Embedded Development Kit (EDK)
to take full advantage of the Altium Designer environment and its
LiveDesign methodology to develop MicroBlaze-based systems.
Altium Designer provides an FPGA vendor-neutral solution to the development
of embedded systems using programmable devices, and provides a number of
cross-device soft processor cores that can be implemented in virtually any
large-scale FPGA. The addition of MicroBlaze support in Altium Designer
6.0, however, allows engineers to take advantage of the higher performance
and smaller size of the MicroBlaze core, which has been specifically
optimized for use with Xilinx FPGAs.
"Xilinx is pleased that Altium has added support for the MicroBlaze to its
Altium Designer system," says Mark Jensen, senior manager of Embedded
Ecosystem Strategic Marketing for the Embedded Processing Division at
Xilinx. "Altium Designer brings a rich set of features and unique,
integrated design methodology for FPGA system development through to board
implementation. The addition of MicroBlaze support means Xilinx customers
can take advantage of this environment for system development, and Altium
customers targeting Xilinx devices can gain the performance benefits of the
MicroBlaze processor."
To support the MicroBlaze, Altium Designer 6.0 includes a special
FPGA-based 'wrapper' core that provides hardware-level design compatibility
with Altium Designer's native cross-device 32-bit processor -- the TSK3000.
The wrapper allows designers to easily switch between the TSK3000 and
MicroBlaze without the need to modify the hardware design, and means that
engineers using the MicroBlaze can take advantage of Altium Designer's
range of included peripherals that use the Wishbone OpenBus interconnect
standard. It also facilitates the use of Altium Designer's FPGA-based
virtual instruments for interactive hardware debugging -- LiveDesign.
Similar wrapper cores are included to support hard processor cores, such as
the PowerPC® available with Xilinx Virtex®-2 Pro FPGAs, and discrete
processors such as PowerPC and ARM® devices.
Altium Designer 6.0 includes a full software tool chain for the MicroBlaze
FPGA-based soft processor that is based on Altium's advanced Viper compiler
technology, which is used across all processors supported by the system.
This provides full C-code compatibility between processors, and produces
fast, highly optimized object code. Internal benchmarking of the initial
Viper-based MicroBlaze compiler implementation shows a code size reduction
of up to 10% compared with other available compiler tool sets. This,
combined with the integration with hardware development process, makes
Altium Designer 6.0 a compelling solution for MicroBlaze developers.
The provision of both hardware and software compatibility between
processors means designers can easily migrate designs between execution
platforms. They can, for example, use the TSK3000 for initial
device-independent system development, then switch to the faster and more
compact MicroBlaze core to specifically target a Xilinx FPGA in the final
product.
"Xilinx has been very active in promoting processor-based system design
using FPGAs, and Altium believes that this is becoming an increasingly
important area as electronic products become more intelligent and complex,"
said Nick Martin, founder and CEO, Altium. "We have developed Altium
Designer to allow all engineers to harness the benefits offered by today's
large-scale FPGA devices, and change the way they approach design moving
into the future. The addition of MicroBlaze support in Altium Designer 6.0
demonstrates our commitment to bringing the widest range of design options
to our customers, and making Altium Designer a complete and unified
solution for electronic product development."
About Altium Limited
Altium Limited (ASX: ALU) is a global developer and supplier of electronics
design software for the Microsoft Windows environment. Founded in 1985,
Altium released the world's first Microsoft Windows-based printed circuit
board design tool in 1991, and continues to provide advanced, easy-to-use
and affordable software design tools for complete electronic product
development to electronics engineers, designers, and developers worldwide.
Altium is headquartered in Sydney, Australia, with sales and support
offices in Australia, the United States, Japan, China and Europe -- and
maintains a large reseller network in all other major markets. For more
information please visit www.altium.com.
About Xilinx
Xilinx is the worldwide leader in complete programmable logic solutions.
For more information, visit www.xilinx.com
Altium, Altium Designer, Board Insight, CAMtastic, CircuitStudio, Design
Explorer, DXP, LiveDesign, NanoBoard, NanoTalk, Nexar, nVisage, P-CAD,
Protel, Situs, TASKING, and Topological Autorouting and their respective
logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of Altium Limited or its
subsidiaries. 'Xilinx,' 'MicroBlaze' and 'Virtex' are trademarks or
registered trademarks of Xilinx, Inc. 'PowerPC' is a registered trademark
of IBM Corp. 'ARM' is a registered trademark of ARM 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.
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