Historically, the most advanced, state-of-the-art design tools have been prohibitively priced, with access being limited to engineers based within the few companies that could afford them.
The Altium vision – unchanged since the Company's inception – is to break down these barriers to innovation and technological advancement and provide every engineer and system designer with easy access to the best possible design solutions. Our ultimate goal is to develop the complete electronics design system and ensure it is available to every professional engineer and designer.
This is the driving force behind why our Company was founded and is still the vision that guides our strategies today and into the future.
Our long history
Altium has a long and proven history of innovation in the electronics industry. Formed in 1985 as Protel International, the company rose to prominence when it released the first PCB design system developed specifically for the Windows operating system. At the time this was seen as a premature move – Windows had not yet established itself as a dominant platform and was not considered a suitable environment for electronics design systems.
We believed, however, that the benefits that Windows brought to the PC desktop would see it quickly adopted and embraced as the operating system of choice, even within the electronics design community. Turning this conviction into a landmark design system allowed our customers to future-proof their design tool investment and gain immediate benefits from an integrated and user-friendly operating environment.
This drive to anticipate future trends and arm our customers with the necessary tools to embrace them is a defining characteristic of Altium as a company. We have a long history in the industry, but that doesn’t mean we rest on our laurels. Indeed the benefit to you as an Altium customer is that we continually strive to bring best of class design systems to your desktop that both meet your current needs and equip you to meet tomorrow’s challenges.
Our global reach
Altium is a global company, with hundreds of employees based in Altium offices throughout the world. From the USA, Australia, Japan, Europe and through to China, we service a large and diverse customer base through direct Altium Sales and Support offices and an extensive network of Value Added Resellers.
That means that whatever your focus, local or global, you’ll have the backup and support you need from Altium experts within all of the regions you operate.
Our focus on the mainstream
Altium focuses exclusively on providing design solutions for the mainstream market. Unlike many design solution providers, we don’t artificially segregate our design technologies into so-called ‘premium’ and ‘entry-level’ systems, only providing the newest technologies to those that can afford to pay a premium price.
Our business model is based on servicing the needs of the majority of engineers and designers. That’s why we offer complete design solutions that include all of the capabilities needed for electronic product development at an affordable price. As we develop new technologies or improve our existing technologies, all of our customers benefit. We don’t hold technology back to justify any premium priced product position.
Regardless of the Altium licenses you hold, you’ll have access to the best possible technology that we can bring to the desktop as soon as it’s available. This ensures that your engineers and designers will always be at the forefront of design innovation.
Future-proofing your company
Altium is dedicated to equipping you to tackle not only the demands of today’s design projects, but to meet these challenges into the future. Electronics technology moves fast and your design systems need to keep up.
In a typical electronic product today, much of the ‘intelligence’ of the product is embodied in the embedded software running on a microprocessor. Pre-built components wired together at the board level provide the platform on which this software runs.
Consider then the impact of the emergence of low-cost, high-capacity programmable devices such as FPGAs. These devices allow the intelligent portions of the design to encompass not only software in the traditional sense, but the soft-wired blocks of hardware implemented inside the FPGA. In this scenario the software, processor and peripheral hardware are all easily changeable - the entire system exists within a ‘soft’ realm. The same benefits gained by moving portions of the design problem from hard-wired components to software are now extended to the entire system.
Embedding intelligence
Rather than just embedded software, you can now imbue your products with true ‘embedded intelligence’, shortening design cycles while adding functionality to your products with no increase in manufacturing costs. Critical design decisions do not have to be locked down until later in the design cycle, and the entire intelligence of the product can be easily updated right up until the product ships – or even beyond.
The possibilities are intriguing to say the least!
And it is these possibilities that have driven Altium to acquire and develop the technologies necessary to support these sorts of design methodologies into the future. Our technology base covers board-level system design, FPGA-level system design, embedded software development and electronics manufacturing.
What’s more, we have invested in the development of a platform to support the unification of the design technologies to provide truly unified design systems that allow, within a single environment, the development of the hard-wired platform and the design and implementation of the embedded intelligence that resides within the programmable elements on that platform.
In other words, our development focus is on providing unified systems that encompass the entire electronic product development process to allow you to take your designs to the next level. And we are committed to developing these systems into the future, bringing in and integrating any technologies that are necessary to promote innovation in electronic product development.
With Altium you’re not only assured of a solution that meets your current needs, but a solution that is actively developed to service your needs into the future.
We build design systems that have the future built in.
Protecting and enhancing your most valuable asset
At Altium we believe that your most valuable asset is not our design systems – it’s the people who use them. The greatest investment you make as a company is in the people you employ. So it makes sense to maximize your investment by providing your engineers and designers with the best possible environment in which to work. And that includes the PC platform they work on.
Some design tool companies make a virtue of the modest system requirements of their products. But given the relatively low cost of even the most powerful PC system compared to the cost of the engineers using them, we believe that making full use of available PC technology is paramount in getting the most from your designers.
We make no excuses for the fact that Altium’s design solutions require the latest fast CPUs, abundant RAM and multiple monitors. Our design systems make full use of this power to provide high levels of automation, extended design capabilities and intuitive graphics-intensive user interfaces so that your designers can be as productive as possible.
Some studies have stated that adding a second monitor to your designer’s desktop increases productivity by 27%. We don’t know how they measured this, and you’re right to be sceptical about such figures, but we do know that multiple, high-resolution monitors make a significant positive difference to a designer’s experience and helps them get their job done more efficiently. Similarly, fast computers with loads of memory make a system more responsive and minimize frustration while designers work.
While we won’t put a figure on just how much this boosts productivity (how do they measure that so accurately!), it doesn’t take double blind statistical study to show that a designer who is working with a state-of-the-art design system on state-of-the-art hardware is going to be one happy designer. And that’s got to be a productivity winner!.