Altium Limited is expanding the Altium Innovation Station with a range of new daughter boards and plug-in peripheral boards that significantly widen the number of target devices and functionality available. The company introduced the boards at the Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose.
The programmable devices used on the new daughter boards include the Xilinx Virtex-5, Spartan-3AN, and Spartan-3A DSP and the Actel ProASIC3. They join boards that cover the Xilinx Virtex-4 and Spartan-3, Altera Cyclone II, and Lattice ECP FPGAs.
The new peripheral boards include:
- a 6-channel, single-sized, multi-network interface power control and monitoring board;
- a 12-channel, double-sized, multi-network interface power control and monitoring board;
- an audio/video board targeted at AV connectivity with Apple-compatible VGA-style interface, iPod-compatible AV ports, and composite video in/out;
- a quad-band GSM and GPS board, and;
- a Bluetooth, Zigbee, and 802.11 wireless board.
These complement the existing Compact flash/ATA/SD board, USB/IrDA/Ethernet board, and double-sized VGA/Composite/S-Video board that come standard with the Desktop NanoBoard.
The Altium Innovation Station lets designers assess and compare different devices and implementations on the fly by simply swapping plug-in boards. The Altium Innovation Station auto-configures the design and development platform to accommodate the new devices. The product provides a high level of design abstraction, which allows all designers, even those with limited or no FPGA design experience, to use the potential of programmable devices.
The Altium Innovation Station, consisting of Altium Designer and the Desktop NanoBoard (with three standard peripheral boards and a choice of one FPGA daughter board), starts at $4300.
Altium Limited
www.altium.com