Nick Martin
Unconventional Widsom from
Altium's Founder

Nick Martin is not bound by high-tech tradition. If he were traditional, he'd have a PhD from Berkeley, UC Irvine, or MIT. If he were traditional, his COO would be an MBA from Stanford and Altium would be another venture-funded EDA company in a high-tech corridor like Silicon Valley, Research Triangle, or Boulder. If he were traditional, Altium's tools would be 80% functional, they'd have no sales or distribution channel, and they'd be looking to be acquired by one of the three major EDA companies.

Instead, Nick is founder and joint-CEO of Altium, Ltd., who is changing the landscape of FPGA and board design with their unconventional approach. Altium's Nexar, announced about a year ago, is quickly establishing itself as the high-capability, low-cost alternative to vendor-specific toolsets for FPGA. Nexar provides an end-to-end system for FPGA design, including a full range of vendor-neutral IP, support for embedded software development, a hardware prototyping and debug system with plug-in modules for devices from Xilinx, Altera, and Actel, and smooth integration with printed circuit board design. Nexar uses a board design approach to system design with FPGAs, allowing designers to stitch together high-level IP building blocks in a schematic environment as an alternative to HDL-based design entry. Both the design paradigm and the price (well under $10K USD) are readily approachable by the average board/system designer wanting to harness the power of FPGA.

Nick came to Australia on a migration program from England at age 14. He attended University of Tasmania, but didn't finish. "I didn't have the patience," Martin quips. "I went out to look for business opportunities." After a year and a half of college he found himself writing computer games for the Z80-based Microbee (an early 1980s Australian kit computer sold as a baggie full of parts and a circuit board), and pursuing his passion for electronics and design. "Ever since I was a kid," he recalls, "I was always building radios and stuff. My first commercial electronics project was a floppy disk controller for a CPM system." [more]