Sydney, Australia — Altium Ltd. has added support for the Xilinx Spartan-6 FPGA family to the latest version of Altium Designer. This latest upgrade delivers more performance, logic and options for FPGA designers, says Altium.
“Continuing to increase the number of devices we support in Altium Designer lets electronics designers explore more of the cost and performance benefits of today’s programmable devices,” says Matt Schwaiger, senior vice president Global Customer Success, at Altium, in a statement.
“FPGAs such as the Xilinx Spartan-6, which offers more logic and more performance at lower cost, are becoming pervasive. And electronics designers without any prior experience can use Altium’s design solutions to develop entire systems based on an FPGA using their board design skills,” Schwaiger says.
Altium says electronics designers use Altium Designer to target either the FPGA of choice, or a range of alternatives to compare performance, power consumption, and other design parameters. In addition, they can change programmable devices during development without significant software or hardware rework, enabling critical design decisions to remain open until much later in the design cycle, and allowing more experimentation and more opportunities for innovation, says the company.
“They can do this because of Altium Designer’s unified architecture and high level of abstraction. Board designers can enter the FPGA space and use Altium’s graphical interface to develop intelligent and connected FPGA-based electronics. This lets them manage the entire electronics design process within a single system,” stated Schwaiger.