CircuitStudio 2004 Design Capabilities Boosted with Support for Verilog

Business Wire, Dec 17, 2004

SYDNEY, Australia -- Altium Limited (ASX:ALU), a leading developer of Windows-based electronics design software, today announced the release of Service Pack 2 (SP2) for its universal front-end engineering design solution, CircuitStudio 2004.

SP2 significantly expands the design capture capabilities of CircuitStudio with more than 100 new features and enhancements, including the addition of support for Verilog design flows. SP2 is available as a free download to all CircuitStudio customers.

CircuitStudio allows the capture and verification of board-level and FPGA-based designs. It integrates schematic and HDL-based design capture with functional VHDL simulation, mixed-signal SPICE 3f5/XSpice circuit simulation and pre-board layout signal integrity analysis to provide a complete engineering design environment.

With SP2, CircuitStudio now enables engineers to mix schematic-based design with both VHDL and Verilog source files, providing greater choice in the capture of FPGA-based designs. CircuitStudio's HDL code editing environment has been enhanced to support Verilog syntax highlighting and code templates.

SP2 also enhances HDL support at the project level to provide easier management and navigation of HDL source files. During compilation, the system automatically determines the correct order and processing hierarchy of HDL files. The HDL document hierarchy is displayed in the Project panel for easy browsing. Enhanced project navigation features allow the designer to crossprobe from compile errors to the affected document, and to trace hierarchy through both schematic and HDL source files.

A new Storage Manager offers complete project-level file control, and an easy-to-use local document history management system to compare and retrieve older versions of documents. Document comparison capabilities have also been strengthened with a new graphical comparator engine that makes it easy to locate and highlight physical changes between revisions of schematic files.

At the schematic level, CircuitStudio's powerful query-based object filtering and editing features have been significantly upgraded to improve ease of use and streamline global editing of design objects. Designers can now select a group of components and easily descend into its common parameters to globally edit attributes of the parameters. Additionally, designers can add parameters to a component directly from the object Inspector panel.

SP2 supports manually defining component and net classes at the schematic level, as well as enhanced control over automatic class generation. There are a host of Graphical User Interface (GUI) upgrades, including: context-sensitive right-click menus in the schematic editor; enhanced sheet entry and sheet symbol editing; improved support for heterogeneous component annotation; the ability to paste text and graphics directly into the schematic editor; and graphical compile masks which allow designers to effectively 'comment out' portions of the schematic during compilation and error checking.

"Service Pack 2 cements CircuitStudio's position as a truly universal design capture environment," commented Rob Irwin, Product Manager for DXP technologies at Altium. "The addition of Verilog support expands the product's reach in FPGA design, and the significant ease-of-use enhancements introduced in SP2 will make all levels of design with CircuitStudio more productive."

CircuitStudio is based on Altium's DXP 2004 technology integration platform and provides seamless connection to back-end design flows with Altium's Protel 2004 board-level design system, and Nexar 2004 FPGA-based digital systems development environment.

CircuitStudio Service Pack 2 highlights

--Addition of Verilog support for design capture

--Intelligent hierarchy determination for HDL-based designs

--Enhanced project and document management with new Storage Manager

--Enhanced version control support with local document history management

--Physical difference comparison of schematic documents

--Simplified global object inspection and editing

--Improved global management of component parameters

--Graphical compile masks to 'comment out' portions of a design during compilation

--Schematic-level component and net class definition and improved control of automatic class generation

--Intelligent context-sensitive right-click menus in schematic editor

--User-definable schematic grids

--Enhanced component library database linking

--Support for Chinese (Simplified), Japanese, German and French languages installations

Pricing and availability

New licenses for CircuitStudio 2004 are priced at US$1995. Upgrades from any Protel or P-CAD schematic license or suite are available for US$995.

For more product information, visit http://www.altium.com/circuitstudio or contact your local Altium Sales and Support Center.

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 to electronics engineers, designers, and developers worldwide. Altium's products offer tailored solutions covering a range of hardware and software design processes including the Nexar, Protel, P-CAD and TASKING brands. Altium is headquartered in Sydney, Australia and has sales and support offices in Australia, the United States, Japan, Europe and China. More information is available at www.altium.com.