Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/942744
FEBRUARY 2018 I DESIGN007 MAGAZINE 37 design PCBs, so I loved it. There were a lot of advantages to that, but only a very small per- centage of customers ever did initial product development with FPGAs. While they liked the idea of using our soft- ware and they liked the user interface and preferred it, it wasn't a realistic play for them. We've actually spent a couple of years winding that FPGA stuff down and maintaining it up to this point for the people who were using it. Shaughnessy: You guys went through a few company names over the past few decades. Jordan: When Nick Martin founded Altium as Protel back in 1985, he predicted that per- sonal computers and IBM PC clones were cheap enough that the PC would become the default desktop design platform. He was a Pas- cal programmer at the time and he decided he could write schematic and PCB design tools that were on par, or even maybe better in some ways than the dedicated workstations that had been around up to that point, and written for the IBM PC it would be accessible. The idea was to put the technology into the hands of any professional designer or engineer. That mission, really, has never changed. We did a lot of cool, different technology experi- ments at Altium. The core mission of putting technology for designing board level electron- ics into the hands of anybody; that's still the same with Altium Designer 18. That's why we made the decision internally to not withhold any kind of design specific technology. For example, if you want ActiveRoute, we're not going to say, "That's an extra licensing option. You have to pay for it." In Altium Designer 18, ActiveRoute has been enhanced further. It can now do length tuning of single-ended and differential pairs. It can do length and phase tuning and matching. It can do glossing. It has extra controls for meander- ing, so we're improving the routing technology for the PCB designer to be more accelerated in their design and to use the power of the PC for automation, and the graphics card, but still develop a board with user guided automation. It's human-guided automation. The other big feature is multi-board assem- blies. We actually did this back in 2006, years before anybody else. There is one other tool on the market with multi-board capability where you can manage the connections and you bring the PCBs into a 3D assembly and make sure it all fits in the enclosure. But the key difference is we're providing this to the mainstream user. Again, we're not charging extra for this. It's just part of Altium Designer 18. Anybody on subscription or anybody getting Altium Designer will have multi-board capabilities. They can manage the connections. They can do electrical rule checking to make sure, from the schematic side, that the connector on board A is wired up exactly the same and matching to its mat - ing counterpart on board B and that their pin numbers are correct. Everybody has been bitten by those kinds of problems when integrating multiple boards into one product. So you bring the boards into an assembly, you can manage the connections and you can synchronize pin swaps on connectors and all of that, but then you can bring it all into the 3D assembly and there's tools for aligning everything together. There's a collision checker in there as well. Shaughnessy: That's very cool. It sounds like you all are pretty responsive, whether the users are yelling on forums or not. Jordan: Yes, our developers are actually very active on the forums and respond directly to customers who have complaints or issues. We have a tech support group and they're really fantastic. The technical support and sales peo- ple are great. People can call them for help with anything, but when you get on the forums, if you really encounter a serious issue with the software or you have a really good idea and you share it, we have an ideas area.