Smart prototyping peripheral board for Altium's NanoBoard FPGA-based platforms

Altium has released a new prototyping peripheral add-on board for its NanoBoard FPGA-based development platforms. The new board works with both the fixed-FPGA NanoBoard 3000 and the fully configurable NanoBoard NB2.

A single on-board connector plugs into the NanoBoard to give direct access to the I/O on the host NanoBoard FPGA and common NanoBoard resources, including power and JTAG lines.

Altium's new smart prototyping boards support a range of surface mount packages and pitches, and thru-hole components on 0.1" or 0.05" grids. Pre-defined land patterns for surface mount devices (SMD) accommodate pitches of 0.5mm, 0.65mm, 0.8mm and 1.27mm, and each SMD pad is connected to a 0.5mm hole to allow simple connections using prototyping wire.

Board identification is achieved using a 1-Wire compatible unique ID device.

Altium's NanoBoard 3000 can be deployed without the need to create a custom PCB or custom device enclosure.

"What this all means is that the electronics designer can focus on creating the intelligence and differentiation in a design, and much less on connecting the components together to create and test the prototype," said Nick Martin, CEO of Altium. "Altium Designer lets them drive the design process in a unified design environment. They can capture their schematic, create the prototype on a NanoBoard, they can easily add their specialist peripherals, and then tap the IP and development infrastructure provided by Altium Designer and the NanoBoard, all without having to create even one custom PCB.

"Once they know the design is good, they can deploy in minutes using the modular enclosures we announced just last week. And the option to go to custom PCB for final product design and manufacture is an easy one to take: they simply take their software design to a full license of Altium Designer and move straight to customer PCB layout.

"It's all about removing as many barriers as we can to allowing designers to focus on being innovative."

Price:
Prototype peripheral boards: $99 for a pack of three, or $395 for a pack of 20
Availability: From mid-December

For more details visit www.altium.com