Altium Ltd. reported earnings results for the first quarter ended September 2009. For the period, the company reported sales of $9.42 million, a decrease of 23% over the previous corresponding quarter. Revenue of $11.38 million was a decrease of 10%.

Altium Ltd. has appointed Premier Farnell plc as the web distributor for its new NanoBoard 3000 FPGA-based development board. The agreement extends to Premier Farnell's family of global marketing and distribution services. The NanoBoard 3000 provides a fixed user FPGA on a motherboard, and a range of peripherals so that designers can experiment with IP as they require. For designers new to using FPGAs, it provides the ideal learning environment to embrace FPGA-based 'soft' design because it allows board designers to experiment with FPGAs using all their existing embedded and board level skills. It makes FPGA design more accessible to more designers, and this distribution agreement makes this logistically possible. The NanoBoard 3000 smart FPGA development board sells for a RRP of $395.

Altium Ltd. has launched a new addition to its NanoBoard family of FPGA-based development boards. The NanoBoard 3000 is a programmable design environment, supplied complete with hardware, software, ready-to-use, royalty-free IP and a dedicated Altium Designer Soft Design license. Designers have everything they need to explore FPGAs 'out of the box'. They are no longer forced to search the web for drivers, peripherals or other software, and then have the hard work of integrating all these elements to make them work together. Using the NanoBoard 3000, electronics designers can construct sophisticated 'soft' processor-based systems inside FPGAs without any prior FPGA expertise. Engineers do not need any specialist VHDL or Verilog skills. Instead, they can use their existing board layout and systems design skills to construct, test and implement FPGA-based embedded systems. The IP libraries and intuitive graphical editors that are central to Altium Designer mean they can simply add processors, memory controllers, peripheral blocks and software stacks. They have everything they need to create next-generation, FPGA-hosted embedded systems with off-the-shelf components without having to write HDL or low level driver code.