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Altium Unifies Electronic Product Development Under Altium Designer

Distribution Source : Market Wire

SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA -- (Market Wire - May 11, 2005) -- Altium Limited (ASX: ALU), a leading developer of Windows-based electronics design software, today announced the unification of the company's recently-released DXP 2004-based products under the Altium Designer name.

The latest 2004 versions of Altium's Protel, Nexar, CircuitStudio, and CAMtastic products all are based on the company's DXP 2004 technology integration platform. What's more, each of these products is a subset of an overall DXP 2004-based design system that provides a complete and diverse set of capabilities for electronic product development. To coincide with the release of Service Pack 3 for DXP 2004, Altium has introduced the name Altium Designer to represent this complete DXP-based design system. The capabilities of Protel, Nexar, CircuitStudio, and CAMtastic remain unchanged, but these brands now represent licensing options of Altium Designer.

Altium has introduced Altium Designer to better reflect the unified nature of its overall DXP-based design system, which provides a single, integrated application that encompasses all the capabilities necessary for electronic product development. It also allows Altium to better communicate the breadth of technologies integrated on its DXP platform -- board-level system design and verification, FPGA-level system design and verification, embedded software development, CAM engineering, and design data, document and library management.

"Soft" design

Altium Designer also provides a focus for the company's industry leadership in facilitating the use of programmable logic to host the entire "embedded intelligence" of design and move away from the hard-wiring of processors and peripherals.

Nick Martin, founder and CEO, Altium, explains: "The development of electronic products is a juggling act that balances the drive to embed more and more intelligence into a design with the time needed to create, implement and test the application. The history of electronics charts a continuous movement towards designing at higher levels of abstraction in order to efficiently contend with increasing levels of complexity. Microprocessors and digital design paradigms allowed portions of the design problem to be moved into a highly fluid and easily updateable realm -- software. This enabled some complexity to be dealt with in a 'soft' environment that was flexible and easily changeable throughout the design process."

Martin continues, "Today the availability at relatively low cost of high-capacity, high-performance programmable devices such as FPGAs is shifting the balance again and allowing previously fixed design elements such as the processor and its peripheral components and logic blocks to be moved into a 'soft' domain. To harness this 'soft' future and take advantage of the benefits that it offers, a unified approach to electronic product development is required. This is the approach we've taken with our product development and is represented by Altium Designer."

Altium Designer

Electronic product development involves combining off-the-shelf components to form a hardware platform, and adding "intelligence" to this platform in the form of software and soft-wired circuitry hosted in programmable devices such as FPGAs.

Altium Designer provides a single, unified application that incorporates all the technologies and capabilities necessary for complete electronic product development. Altium Designer integrates board- and FPGA-level system design, embedded software development for FPGA-based processors, and PCB layout, editing and manufacturing within a single design environment. This, combined with modern design data management capabilities, makes Altium Designer the complete solution for electronic product development -- a solution that caters for both today's and tomorrow's development needs.

Licensing Options

Altium's current DXP 2004-based products -- Protel 2004, Nexar 2004, CircuitStudio 2004, and CAMtastic 2004 -- are all licensing options of Altium Designer, and offer a subset of capabilities targeted towards specific members of design teams. Altium's current Unified Nexar-Protel license gives access to the full capabilities of the Altium Designer system.

Because all of these license options reflect different capability sets of a single system -- Altium Designer -- companies can deploy a mix of licenses to suit their design team needs, with the complete assurance that all team members are operating within a single, integrated environment. All team members, regardless of whether they have a CircuitStudio, Protel, Nexar, CAMtastic or Unified Nexar-Protel license option, share a common environment, work within common projects and access common design editors and capabilities.

The CircuitStudio licensing option, priced at US$1,995, is targeted at front-end design engineers. CAMtastic, priced at US$2,995, provides specialized capabilities for CAM needs. The Protel licensing option at US$9,995 is targeted at board-level system design. Nexar, also priced at US$9,995, focuses on FPGA-level system design and integrating soft processors within programmable devices. The Unified Nexar-Protel licensing option gives access to the full range of Altium Designer capabilities and is priced at US$11,995. For more information on licensing options and associated capabilities, please refer to the attached "Altium Designer Feature Set Summary."

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, and has sales and support offices in Australia, the United States, Japan, Europe and China. For more information, please visit www.altium.com.

Altium, Altium Designer, 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. All other registered or unregistered trademarks referenced herein are the property of their respective owners, and no trademark rights to the same are claimed.

Altium USA Media Contact:

Sarah Seifert
Edelman
800 West El Camino Real Ste. 400
Mountain View, CA 94040
USA
www.edelman.com
Telephone: +1 650 968 4033
Fax: +1 650 968 2201
Email: sarah.seifert@edelman.com

Corporate Media Contact:

Bernadette Rose
Altium Limited
Level 3, 12a Rodborough Road
Frenchs Forest, NSW 2086
Australia
www.altium.com
Telephone: +61 2 9975 7710
Fax: +61 2 9975 7720
Email: Bernadette.rose@altium.com.au

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