Renesas Buys Altium(renesas.com)
renesas.com
Renesas Buys Altium
https://www.renesas.com/us/en/about/press-room/renesas-acquire-pcb-design-software-leader-altium-make-electronics-design-accessible-broader-market
71 comments
Altium quality turned to crap the moment you could have libraries that you couldn't extract the data from.
The single thing Altium really had going for it was that it had sort of become a lingua franca of sharable designs. And engineers, being the lazy shits they are, would simply pack up the library and ship it with the schematics. Consequently, you got an actual, engineering validated symbol and layout when a company gave you schematics.
Once Altium changed such that you could ship a library that couldn't be extracted from, they lost the only thing that really set them apart from the competition.
All the cloud and parts management crap was just insult to injury after that.
KiCAD is good enough for all but the most demanding commercial use at this point. It has some quirks, but all CAD programs do. Every major release has been a big step forward. Version 7 was a huge step up, and they're about to release Version 8.
The biggest issues with KiCad would be using them for very complex designs: huge numbers of length-matched busses (think desktop computer motherboards), weird flex designs that need combined electro-mechanical CAD, so many signals that you need a complex autorouter, extremely advanced inventory management, etc.
The single thing Altium really had going for it was that it had sort of become a lingua franca of sharable designs. And engineers, being the lazy shits they are, would simply pack up the library and ship it with the schematics. Consequently, you got an actual, engineering validated symbol and layout when a company gave you schematics.
Once Altium changed such that you could ship a library that couldn't be extracted from, they lost the only thing that really set them apart from the competition.
All the cloud and parts management crap was just insult to injury after that.
KiCAD is good enough for all but the most demanding commercial use at this point. It has some quirks, but all CAD programs do. Every major release has been a big step forward. Version 7 was a huge step up, and they're about to release Version 8.
The biggest issues with KiCad would be using them for very complex designs: huge numbers of length-matched busses (think desktop computer motherboards), weird flex designs that need combined electro-mechanical CAD, so many signals that you need a complex autorouter, extremely advanced inventory management, etc.
The step backwards you see Altium regarding not being able to freely export/import is the result of a nut job named Henry Potts, who also formerly ruled Mentor with an iron fist. He did not bring about positive change, quite the opposite.
He did the same thing regarding locking down import/export with Expedition circa ~2006 or ~2008(?) specifically to tie people into a Mentor flow, breaking years of tools people had written that enabled footprint / schematic import/export capability.
In an a "Jack Welch" kind of way, somehow he attained industry envy from the other EDA companies and Altium hired him, even though, like Jack Welch, he's not someone who actually did positive things.
He did the same thing regarding locking down import/export with Expedition circa ~2006 or ~2008(?) specifically to tie people into a Mentor flow, breaking years of tools people had written that enabled footprint / schematic import/export capability.
In an a "Jack Welch" kind of way, somehow he attained industry envy from the other EDA companies and Altium hired him, even though, like Jack Welch, he's not someone who actually did positive things.
KiCad is a fantastic option for simple PCBs.
For even moderately complex work, Altium and KiCad aren’t even comparable. I don’t think the size of this gap is obvious to the average hobbyist, but professional packages like Altium have a depth and breadth of features that will take years or decades to replicate in the open source space. There’s a reason professionals and organizations are paying huge amounts of money for Altium licenses still.
For even moderately complex work, Altium and KiCad aren’t even comparable. I don’t think the size of this gap is obvious to the average hobbyist, but professional packages like Altium have a depth and breadth of features that will take years or decades to replicate in the open source space. There’s a reason professionals and organizations are paying huge amounts of money for Altium licenses still.
We switched from Altium to kicad and it has been great so far. Haven’t found a feature that existed in Altium that we are missing now. For support we subscribe to kipro[1], which is a lot cheaper than an Altium license and their support blows Altium support easily out of the water. If you report a bug to them which is easy enough to fix, the next minor release will have it implemented. Altium has (or at least had) bugs that persisted for years and reporting them did nothing. We build power electronics, so this isn’t RF stuff or Gigabit communication. So I cannot speak for that.
[1] https://www.kipro-pcb.com/
[1] https://www.kipro-pcb.com/
> We switched from Altium to kicad and it has been great so far. Haven’t found a feature that existed in Altium that we are missing now.
If the feature set of KiCad fits your needs, then it's a great choice. It does quite well at simple boards and it can be made to work for certain minimal high-speed or RF boards if you have enough space and know how to make it work for you.
However, I'm surprised you haven't found any features that you're missing. Even common settings like design rules are missing frequently-used features in KiCad. I immediately miss some of the more fine-grained design rule settings of the more powerful packages every time I use KiCad.
If the feature set of KiCad fits your needs, then it's a great choice. It does quite well at simple boards and it can be made to work for certain minimal high-speed or RF boards if you have enough space and know how to make it work for you.
However, I'm surprised you haven't found any features that you're missing. Even common settings like design rules are missing frequently-used features in KiCad. I immediately miss some of the more fine-grained design rule settings of the more powerful packages every time I use KiCad.
KiCad has basic design rules and a design rules scripting system, you can create a lot of design rules through that mechanism. Generally we take feedback on rules that can't currently be scripted and there are real applications for.
KiCAD is amazing for simple PCBs, but if you're going into 10+ layers and dealing with high-frequency designs, you're going to have a lot of issues.
Similarly to many other open-source design apps, KiCad has a fairly horrid UX and lacks some enterprise features (especially around collaboration on larger projects), but it's definitely being used for complex projects at a good number of companies.
And the reasons why professionals and organizations are paying huge amounts for specific software are often less enlightened than we tend to assume. Inertia is a huge factor. Many universities train students to use Altium, for example, so it's often the path of least resistance. Plus, when you have processes and teams built around a tool that was cutting-edge a decade or two ago, it can be hard to switch. Especially for niche software like this, interoperability tents to be poor, every vendor invents their own UI and terminology from first principles, etc.
But KiCad and Altium are not the only choices. There are affordable "serious hobbyist" products with much better UX (e.g., Diptrace) and there are higher-end commercial tools that leave Altium in the dust.
And the reasons why professionals and organizations are paying huge amounts for specific software are often less enlightened than we tend to assume. Inertia is a huge factor. Many universities train students to use Altium, for example, so it's often the path of least resistance. Plus, when you have processes and teams built around a tool that was cutting-edge a decade or two ago, it can be hard to switch. Especially for niche software like this, interoperability tents to be poor, every vendor invents their own UI and terminology from first principles, etc.
But KiCad and Altium are not the only choices. There are affordable "serious hobbyist" products with much better UX (e.g., Diptrace) and there are higher-end commercial tools that leave Altium in the dust.
Anybody who needs real PCB features isn't using Alitum. They're using Mentor Xpedition or Cadence Allegro.
I honestly couldn't tell if you're being serious or doing Real Programmers, but after a quick search Mentor Xpedition seems to be a Siemens product, and I know (just from YouTube videos of people using Fusion360 or Solidworks) their 3D CAD package is the 'big boy' one for mech engineers, so I'm leaning to the former?
I'm just surprised I haven't even heard of them before (I've heard of Cadence but not confident about Allegro) - though I did manage my quasi-EE degree I think without ever touching PCB design! (I've done so before and since, but just Eagle, Kicad, and.. I think it was called CircuitWizard at school.)
As a massive tangent, I've repeatedly since thought that CircuitWizard or something like it (or whatever it's called) would actually be great for the sort of Arduino hobbyist/newcomer - it had a really good built-in component library, but quite small, and (crucially for that audience IMO) no or little choice, so really simplified. Like I need a mux of this size, or I need 4 NAND gates or whatever, and you just place that part and it lists the BOM - you're not bogged down with an overwhelming choice where to a newcomer it probably doesn't matter, or at least there's an obvious non-specialised choice.
I'm just surprised I haven't even heard of them before (I've heard of Cadence but not confident about Allegro) - though I did manage my quasi-EE degree I think without ever touching PCB design! (I've done so before and since, but just Eagle, Kicad, and.. I think it was called CircuitWizard at school.)
As a massive tangent, I've repeatedly since thought that CircuitWizard or something like it (or whatever it's called) would actually be great for the sort of Arduino hobbyist/newcomer - it had a really good built-in component library, but quite small, and (crucially for that audience IMO) no or little choice, so really simplified. Like I need a mux of this size, or I need 4 NAND gates or whatever, and you just place that part and it lists the BOM - you're not bogged down with an overwhelming choice where to a newcomer it probably doesn't matter, or at least there's an obvious non-specialised choice.
1 point by vrinsd 14 minutes ago | root | parent | next | edit | delete [–]
I won't be as snide as bsder, but I will say Expedition and Allegro let you handle some crazy complex designs, which are much more of a challenge with Altium. Things like DDR3/4/5, 10+ layer PCBs, complex design rules, etc. Personally I think Expedition is much much easier to use than Allegro ; for the curious it was actually created by a company called 'Veribest' that Mentor later acquired.
Having using Altium (all the way back to when it was Protel 98/99SE) it's gained a lot of impressive capability but it never shed a number of weird UI oddities.
I'm really happy to see the direction KiCad is going, having used it circa v3 era, it's MUCH more usable.
I won't be as snide as bsder, but I will say Expedition and Allegro let you handle some crazy complex designs, which are much more of a challenge with Altium. Things like DDR3/4/5, 10+ layer PCBs, complex design rules, etc. Personally I think Expedition is much much easier to use than Allegro ; for the curious it was actually created by a company called 'Veribest' that Mentor later acquired.
Having using Altium (all the way back to when it was Protel 98/99SE) it's gained a lot of impressive capability but it never shed a number of weird UI oddities.
I'm really happy to see the direction KiCad is going, having used it circa v3 era, it's MUCH more usable.
Mentor used to be independent but got bought by Siemens.
In general, Mentor and Cadence packages are where the serious electrical engineering happens where you are talking about routing gigahertz signals and simulating it. Even thermal simulations are a big deal in those suites.
In general, Mentor and Cadence packages are where the serious electrical engineering happens where you are talking about routing gigahertz signals and simulating it. Even thermal simulations are a big deal in those suites.
All the PCB designs that I’ve been exposed to professionally, both in-house and at customers in Taiwan (think ODMs for Acer, Asus, …), were designed with Cadence Allegro. These are all complex designs with high-speed interfaces (PCIe, DDR5, …), 12+ layers etc.
Ironically, It’s only when I started doing hobby electronics that I learned about the existence of Altium.
(That’s not a value judgement of Altium, I honestly don’t know how they compare.)
Ironically, It’s only when I started doing hobby electronics that I learned about the existence of Altium.
(That’s not a value judgement of Altium, I honestly don’t know how they compare.)
A company down the road from me building automotive electronics including for Formula 1, would beg to differ.
By 'real electronics' they probably mean high frequency or very high speed designs, a GPU card manufacturer say.
No doubt there's a lot of complexity in F1 electronics, but they certainly have more space, cooling, reasonable environment, etc. to work with than some industries.
(Not to disagree that it was dismissive and a lot of serious work gets done with Altium Designer, and for that matter Kicad, of course.)
No doubt there's a lot of complexity in F1 electronics, but they certainly have more space, cooling, reasonable environment, etc. to work with than some industries.
(Not to disagree that it was dismissive and a lot of serious work gets done with Altium Designer, and for that matter Kicad, of course.)
> By 'real electronics' they probably mean high frequency or very high speed designs, a GPU card manufacturer say.
Altium has good support for high speed design features. (Source: Have done many high-speed designs in Altium and Allegro)
Altium is quite common at tech companies. I think maybe the parent commenter was being sarcastic?
Altium has good support for high speed design features. (Source: Have done many high-speed designs in Altium and Allegro)
Altium is quite common at tech companies. I think maybe the parent commenter was being sarcastic?
Not being sarcastic. Altium doesn't even remotely compare to something like Xpedition or Allegro.
Mostly I was refuting:
> There’s a reason professionals and organizations are paying huge amounts of money for Altium licenses still.
Uh, no. They're not actually paying huge amounts--that's part of the reason Altium got bought. Professionals use professional tools--Altium doesn't qualify. I really do not understand what Renesas thinks they are going to get from this.
The autorouter is terrible. The constraint mechanisms suck. Co-design with mechanical CAD is poor. Large designs slow it to a crawl. Design sharing is incredibly weak. Source control and database integrations are laughably bad. I can go on and on and on.
There are solid reasons why professionals pay an order of magnitude more money for Xpedition and Allegro over Altium.
Sure, I have designed high-speed digital as well as high-GHz RF designs in weak PCB products (including both Altium and KiCad)--that's not a badge of honor, though.
When time and efficiency actually matters, you put on your big boy boots, suck it up and cough up real money for real tools.
> Altium is quite common at tech companies.
This is fine. As is using KiCad. 99% of companies are not doing anything complex enough for it to matter.
Mostly I was refuting:
> There’s a reason professionals and organizations are paying huge amounts of money for Altium licenses still.
Uh, no. They're not actually paying huge amounts--that's part of the reason Altium got bought. Professionals use professional tools--Altium doesn't qualify. I really do not understand what Renesas thinks they are going to get from this.
The autorouter is terrible. The constraint mechanisms suck. Co-design with mechanical CAD is poor. Large designs slow it to a crawl. Design sharing is incredibly weak. Source control and database integrations are laughably bad. I can go on and on and on.
There are solid reasons why professionals pay an order of magnitude more money for Xpedition and Allegro over Altium.
Sure, I have designed high-speed digital as well as high-GHz RF designs in weak PCB products (including both Altium and KiCad)--that's not a badge of honor, though.
When time and efficiency actually matters, you put on your big boy boots, suck it up and cough up real money for real tools.
> Altium is quite common at tech companies.
This is fine. As is using KiCad. 99% of companies are not doing anything complex enough for it to matter.
It's awfully rich saying:
> Anybody who needs real PCB features isn't using Alitum
and:
> 99% of companies are not doing anything complex enough for it to matter
in the same breath - it really doesn't do your argument any favors. I can't see a world in which only 1% and "anybody who needs real PCB features" are congruent statements.
> Anybody who needs real PCB features isn't using Alitum
and:
> 99% of companies are not doing anything complex enough for it to matter
in the same breath - it really doesn't do your argument any favors. I can't see a world in which only 1% and "anybody who needs real PCB features" are congruent statements.
Well see my other comment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39391097 - they're somewhat doing XKCD's Real Programmers.
Maybe not quite taken to the absolute extreme, there may be a point there about actually needing more advanced tools at some level, but.. plenty of real world serious work gets done with all sorts of tools including Kicad.
Maybe not quite taken to the absolute extreme, there may be a point there about actually needing more advanced tools at some level, but.. plenty of real world serious work gets done with all sorts of tools including Kicad.
Exactly.
I feel like there's this sort of reverse Dunning-Krueger effect where people who are sufficiently advanced in a particular subject area lose track of just how much can be accomplished without operating at, and using tooling at, that same level.
Case in point, it still blows my mind that HN runs on a single process on a single server. Surely one of the tech world's most well known news aggregators would have many servers behind it, with advanced autoscaling for when different time zones come online, a database that's sharded by discussion thread, some super advanced caching solution, ...
But no. HN hums along just fine without any of that fancy stuff.
The truly enlightened, in my opinion, know how to look at the world through the eyes of those less experiences than themselves - and to see how much there is to see when one takes off one's expert glasses for a moment.
I feel like there's this sort of reverse Dunning-Krueger effect where people who are sufficiently advanced in a particular subject area lose track of just how much can be accomplished without operating at, and using tooling at, that same level.
Case in point, it still blows my mind that HN runs on a single process on a single server. Surely one of the tech world's most well known news aggregators would have many servers behind it, with advanced autoscaling for when different time zones come online, a database that's sharded by discussion thread, some super advanced caching solution, ...
But no. HN hums along just fine without any of that fancy stuff.
The truly enlightened, in my opinion, know how to look at the world through the eyes of those less experiences than themselves - and to see how much there is to see when one takes off one's expert glasses for a moment.
It’s not about whether or not you can accomplish the same tasks, but how much time and pain you can save. Can I do the many of the same things in freecad or inkscape as solidworks or illustrator? Yea, but it is quite unpleasant.
See I think the bigger problem there is that, having used both myself, FreeCAD and Inkscape both have really sucky UX (the former more than the latter, to be sure).
A better comparison would be Canva. Can I do everything in Canva that I can in Illustrator? Not by a long shot. Is it still good enough for 80% of the things I need to do? Absolutely. Is it a delight to work with despite its comparative simplicity? You bet.
So I agree that time and pain saved is hugely important, but that's an orthogonal axis to how advanced a tool is. The two only really correlate when you're doing things that need that advanced tooling in order to avoid a lot of manual work.
A better comparison would be Canva. Can I do everything in Canva that I can in Illustrator? Not by a long shot. Is it still good enough for 80% of the things I need to do? Absolutely. Is it a delight to work with despite its comparative simplicity? You bet.
So I agree that time and pain saved is hugely important, but that's an orthogonal axis to how advanced a tool is. The two only really correlate when you're doing things that need that advanced tooling in order to avoid a lot of manual work.
> I feel like there's this sort of reverse Dunning-Krueger effect where people who are sufficiently advanced in a particular subject area lose track of just how much can be accomplished without operating at, and using tooling at, that same level.
And I feel it's a Dunning-Krueger effect that people who don't know more powerful tools can't understand why you might benefit from using them.
I assert that you've lost track of how much you can accomplish programming in Notepad and it would be enlightening to look at the lens of how people accomplish that. Now do you understand why you might want to use more powerful tools?
Or, perhaps in a more concrete sense, not every woodworking shop needs a $150K CNC machine--the $10K ones work great for 99% of the shops. However, the ones that do need that $150K CNC are producing a LOT of product.
And I feel it's a Dunning-Krueger effect that people who don't know more powerful tools can't understand why you might benefit from using them.
I assert that you've lost track of how much you can accomplish programming in Notepad and it would be enlightening to look at the lens of how people accomplish that. Now do you understand why you might want to use more powerful tools?
Or, perhaps in a more concrete sense, not every woodworking shop needs a $150K CNC machine--the $10K ones work great for 99% of the shops. However, the ones that do need that $150K CNC are producing a LOT of product.
> Professionals use professional tools--Altium doesn't qualify.
> 99% of companies are not doing anything complex enough for it to matter.
There seems to be very few professionals in the industry then.
> 99% of companies are not doing anything complex enough for it to matter.
There seems to be very few professionals in the industry then.
>Uh, no. They're not actually paying huge amounts--that's part of the reason Altium got bought. Professionals use professional tools--Altium doesn't qualify. I really do not understand what Renesas thinks they are going to get from this.
1. Data mining the usage of competitor products
2. An avenue to shovel their chips. Even though they are massive assholes to work with and don't want to talk to you if to you aren't buying millions of chips per week.
3. Semiconductor manufacturers seem to see "buying software" as some diversification scheme. looks at Broadcom
1. Data mining the usage of competitor products
2. An avenue to shovel their chips. Even though they are massive assholes to work with and don't want to talk to you if to you aren't buying millions of chips per week.
3. Semiconductor manufacturers seem to see "buying software" as some diversification scheme. looks at Broadcom
Oh I know. I was just trying to offer an interpretation.
> I think maybe the parent commenter was being sarcastic?
Yeah, see my direct reply to them (before my comment above), I honestly don't know.
> I think maybe the parent commenter was being sarcastic?
Yeah, see my direct reply to them (before my comment above), I honestly don't know.
>By 'real electronics' they probably mean high frequency or very high speed designs, a GPU card manufacturer say.
I duuno man, at a startup I worked at, the graybeard EE was doing 2.4GHz RF design on software cheaper and more rudimentary than Altium, let alone Cadence.
So I'm always rolling my eyes when someone uses the world "real" as some sort of macho flex with vague meaning like "real men", "real work", "real engineering", "real software development", as if only their particular example makes the world go round and scoff at everything else like it's unimportant child's play.
I duuno man, at a startup I worked at, the graybeard EE was doing 2.4GHz RF design on software cheaper and more rudimentary than Altium, let alone Cadence.
So I'm always rolling my eyes when someone uses the world "real" as some sort of macho flex with vague meaning like "real men", "real work", "real engineering", "real software development", as if only their particular example makes the world go round and scoff at everything else like it's unimportant child's play.
Sure, you can do 2.4GHz on a 2 layer board with even the simplest programs, or even Inkscape really. The hard part is arguably knowing the write math involved to design with signal integrity in mind.
When you start working with very high speed things like DDR4/DDR5 on 14 layer boards you could do it with simpler software, but I don't see why you would. The time saved with the design tools and signal integrity simulations would likely be worth much more than the licensing cost, especially if you're bigger than a small hobby shop. Not to mention the money saved on having software that can identify mistakes early on when the PCBs alone can cost thousands.
And then there's all the other bits like conforming to standards, providing deliverables in a format that the next place down the line deems "acceptable" (or they're just picky), as interoperability with other teams, because sometimes you're just one small part of the design process.
When you start working with very high speed things like DDR4/DDR5 on 14 layer boards you could do it with simpler software, but I don't see why you would. The time saved with the design tools and signal integrity simulations would likely be worth much more than the licensing cost, especially if you're bigger than a small hobby shop. Not to mention the money saved on having software that can identify mistakes early on when the PCBs alone can cost thousands.
And then there's all the other bits like conforming to standards, providing deliverables in a format that the next place down the line deems "acceptable" (or they're just picky), as interoperability with other teams, because sometimes you're just one small part of the design process.
Once upon a time c. 2002, I used OrCAD (since folded into Allegro?) for industrial analog and mixed signal boards. It was relatively easy and usable compared to the alternatives. I'm wondering if Allegro is usable today or has a steep learning curve for prosumer individual EEs.
Cadence bought OrCAD and kept the schematic editor but the layout is Allegro, not the layout tool that historically was part of OrCAD.
Allegro IMO does have a pretty steep learning curve, I think it's UI is quite archaic, it really hasn't see any serious improvements in over 20-years.
I'd suggest Kicad if you wanted to do anything personal.
Allegro IMO does have a pretty steep learning curve, I think it's UI is quite archaic, it really hasn't see any serious improvements in over 20-years.
I'd suggest Kicad if you wanted to do anything personal.
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"real PCB" meaning massive boards with ton of layers. Personally I think this is a bad take, as there are many 4-8 layer boards that can be made fine with allium and those pcb's probably feel pretty "real".
Yep. If you were a gaming PC motherboard PCB manufacturer needing 8 layers, blind micro vias, and G-code output for drilling, good luck with that using anything but those enterprise EDA suites mentioned. EDA users exist along multiple dimensions including level of detail, subassembly/mechanical/BOM management, customizability, system/signal simulation/verification, automation, learning curve, and cost.
The gap is closing, and that should be deeply embarrasing to Altium, given the difference in resources. But Altium has completely squandered their efforts on stuff that isn't actually particularly useful for most of their users, while failing to fix bugs or otherwise improve the usability of their products for ~90% of their users. Altium today is about as useful to me as Altium 10 years ago. KiCAD has improved by leaps and bounds in the same timeframe.
I was once at an event, and a guy had some beautiful mixed signal something at a booth. Somehow I asked "so this is actually done in like KiCad..." and he kind of cut me with "well I have Altium subscription actually" and that, sufficed. Quality and feature set difference between these products is that obvious at mid-high ranges.
How does Altium compare against Cadence Allegro?
Altium could always get worse. Renesas could be bought by a private equity firm.
Do you have any data to back up that take or are you just spewing FUD for no reason?
Altium cratered in quality about 10 minutes after it ceased being Protel, first because of their braindead attempt to turn it into a generic FPGA layout system, then by their insistance on making it cloud based.
I absolutely loathe cloud based tooling. It really sits wrong with me that to do any kind of development you start off with shipping your IP to another party, who may or may not have their security done properly.
It's a weird feeling knowing that Altium isn't a pure ECAD company anymore. Like sure, the team is all the same and will build an EDA tool, but somewhere higher up, there will be a skew towards the automotive industry.
I used Altium in my previous job in high voltage and we were amonst the first to use the Creepage feature. It reminded me that there's niche features to be developed for every industry, and there's a future where they resource heavily on automotive. On one hand, $6B seems like enough to go around for everyone but on the other hand, Renesas would only spend $6B if they saw it making/saving them $10B+.
I'd like them to speak more on the long term vision and focus of the product; I think they've done a good job at serving EEs so far and if they'll still hold that position or get pulled away into one loud market. Regardless, that's like in 5-10 years time; I'd be impressed if anything changes in the next 2 years.
Full disclosure, I'm now working at flux.ai but I don't think that doesn't really changes the news for me; I understand Altium is still used by many EE companies who I can still sympathize with, and we're humbly comin' after them :P
I used Altium in my previous job in high voltage and we were amonst the first to use the Creepage feature. It reminded me that there's niche features to be developed for every industry, and there's a future where they resource heavily on automotive. On one hand, $6B seems like enough to go around for everyone but on the other hand, Renesas would only spend $6B if they saw it making/saving them $10B+.
I'd like them to speak more on the long term vision and focus of the product; I think they've done a good job at serving EEs so far and if they'll still hold that position or get pulled away into one loud market. Regardless, that's like in 5-10 years time; I'd be impressed if anything changes in the next 2 years.
Full disclosure, I'm now working at flux.ai but I don't think that doesn't really changes the news for me; I understand Altium is still used by many EE companies who I can still sympathize with, and we're humbly comin' after them :P
Looking at Wikipedia, Autodesk tried to buy them for less some years back. Altium's clearly been looking for buyers, and if I was their customer, I'd be happy my main PCB design tool wasn't gobbled up into the Autodesk empire.
I'd be far happier if they weren't gobbled up at all. It's pretty rare than an acquisition ends up being a positive for the customers that made the company into what it is in the first place.
This is like a console maker buying a game studio (think Microsoft buying Blizzard). There really are no "good for customers" synergies here.
A 'broader market' may well mean it's no longer $20,000 per seat.
They really should just shift to a usage-based model billed hourly...
With the way Altium is used I feel like hourly billing would be an insane disaster. (So it's probably coming in 24.1....) There's so much time spent fighting the tool and even recovering from its crashes that there would need to be a refund system!
This is off-topic but I disagree with this comparison. Microsoft Game Studios has consistently been a great producer of video games going all the way back to when they first started. Blizzard has been destroyed from inside with Activision and their leadership left as a result of that to open up new studios. I’m optimistic about a return to form under Microsoft, but I am also aware we can’t step into the same river twice and it’s not the golden age of blizzard games anymore.
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Interesting, wonder if Renasas can push Altium past Zuken in the Japanese market, or if this is their play to capture more markets outside of Japan.
Which is weird because modern Zuken tools look really intelligent designed. I haven't tried them since they ran on Sun workstations but CR-8000 looks impressive.
Indeed, Zuken is still a large player in Japan, and has a leg up with IC packaging tools which the big players (Cadence, Mentor) have that Altium doesn’t.
Altium’s play has always been to segment the market at the hobby+small enterprise+startup level, with aim to push further up to larger enterprises as those companies grow. They’re taking aim at the next gen EE/design engineers as the graybeards age out of the industry. Let’s see if this strategy holds out with Renesas positioned above.
Altium’s play has always been to segment the market at the hobby+small enterprise+startup level, with aim to push further up to larger enterprises as those companies grow. They’re taking aim at the next gen EE/design engineers as the graybeards age out of the industry. Let’s see if this strategy holds out with Renesas positioned above.
Curious to hear what Altium does that a really good open source EDA like Horizon EDA doesn't do.
https://horizon-eda.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
https://horizon-eda.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
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Why do I get the feeling this is an information raid. Renesas buys Altium, does lots of analytics on users to find industry trends, and then splits Altium off again. Meanwhile, Renesas' products suddenly get a lot more in-tune with customer needs.
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What is the reason behind this purchase ?
For $6B, they could have bought completely new technology such as UWB, etc which they may not have.
Not sure if their pending offer for sequens is done or not as we’ll
For $6B, they could have bought completely new technology such as UWB, etc which they may not have.
Not sure if their pending offer for sequens is done or not as we’ll
I liked it so much I bought the company.
Silicon is the most important resource in the world, as evidenced by FAANG
FAANG’s ability to scale up compute is limited by their ability to design, test, and manufacture silicon. Every competitive AI company is working to build it’s own
Everyone is focused on making software layer more efficient, we are seeing 3-5x productivity gains
I am the founder of https://flux.ai and we are the only ones making the hardware layer more efficient, 6-15x productivity gains!
As you saw with NVIDIA’s growth, the hardware side of this is as valuable as the software side
Flux.ai is a AI first hardware design platform build for the modern age. Our mission is to take the “hard” out of hardware
LFG
FAANG’s ability to scale up compute is limited by their ability to design, test, and manufacture silicon. Every competitive AI company is working to build it’s own
Everyone is focused on making software layer more efficient, we are seeing 3-5x productivity gains
I am the founder of https://flux.ai and we are the only ones making the hardware layer more efficient, 6-15x productivity gains!
As you saw with NVIDIA’s growth, the hardware side of this is as valuable as the software side
Flux.ai is a AI first hardware design platform build for the modern age. Our mission is to take the “hard” out of hardware
LFG
Btw, you guys are violating the ViewCube patent that Autodesk has. You should be careful.
https://patents.google.com/patent/US7782319B2/en
It's why we never implemented it in KiCad, and why Blender has a "2d drawn navigation controller" instead of 3d drawn.
But yea, I'm not the biggest fan of the Flux approach but maybe I'm too traditionist. I'm a big fan of _understanding_ the design. Yes, I can even use a code gen to generate a fuck ton of boilerplate now with AI. But do I actually know what it's doing? At a surface level sure, at the indepth level? Ugh I don't look.
The penalty of using AI at hardware is the designer loses any forced motivation to actually understand what they are designing. This is critical to be able to troubleshoot designs, and even do things like worse case failure analysis and anything fancier.
For simple designs, sure, you probably don't care or need to know much about a LM317 linear regulator putting 5V to a terminal block.
For advanced designs, from my and many others experience, the problem escalates to chips having undocumented errata and even datasheets just being wrong. If you don't read the datasheet in the first place in the design, you'll be even more lost trying to figure out what's going on. You ultimately have to reach out to the semiconductor vendor and go back and forth, but if you don't even have that starting knowledge you aren't going to be very productive doing so.
Otherwise if I want a generated design for something simple, I could just use TI's WebBench and the like to generate them, no AI required :shrug:. I still get bit once in awhile with regulators that have compensation loop issues contrary to the datasheet the generator was based on. Hah.
It's why we never implemented it in KiCad, and why Blender has a "2d drawn navigation controller" instead of 3d drawn.
But yea, I'm not the biggest fan of the Flux approach but maybe I'm too traditionist. I'm a big fan of _understanding_ the design. Yes, I can even use a code gen to generate a fuck ton of boilerplate now with AI. But do I actually know what it's doing? At a surface level sure, at the indepth level? Ugh I don't look.
The penalty of using AI at hardware is the designer loses any forced motivation to actually understand what they are designing. This is critical to be able to troubleshoot designs, and even do things like worse case failure analysis and anything fancier.
For simple designs, sure, you probably don't care or need to know much about a LM317 linear regulator putting 5V to a terminal block.
For advanced designs, from my and many others experience, the problem escalates to chips having undocumented errata and even datasheets just being wrong. If you don't read the datasheet in the first place in the design, you'll be even more lost trying to figure out what's going on. You ultimately have to reach out to the semiconductor vendor and go back and forth, but if you don't even have that starting knowledge you aren't going to be very productive doing so.
Otherwise if I want a generated design for something simple, I could just use TI's WebBench and the like to generate them, no AI required :shrug:. I still get bit once in awhile with regulators that have compensation loop issues contrary to the datasheet the generator was based on. Hah.
> For simple designs, sure, you probably don't care or need to know much about a LM317 linear regulator putting 5V to a terminal block.
Oddly, this is exactly the type of person for whom AI will result in a failure. You can get AI to generate this bit and instantly know how to integrate it and if it's got a major error/oversight.
I literally tried to do this with a 9V battery and a vape cartridge (simple resistance load) to jerry-rig a vape whose power source had died but the rest worked fine. I had a box of all the most common op-amps, transistors, and some voltage regulators. Also plenty of other passives on-hand, pretty much anything that could be needed. I asked a variety of AI's including ChatGPT-4 and Flux.ai to design this for me. But none of them worked for providing enough current, or even generally the right voltage.
And I didn't know enough about electronics to know what wasn't working.
I use AI a lot in software programming. But I use it for the basic, boring boilerplate stuff that I just don't want to type. It frees up my time and brainpower to spend on the hard parts with trickier data structures and algorithms where there's no "right" answer, just different trade-offs. Using AI for the simple stuff is easy because I can quickly read the code that is output and instantly find any errors before I copy/paste it into my work. But if I ask the AI to make something complicated, it can take awhile for me to see where the errors are, or that there's a subtle structural problem with the architecture that's making things far more complex than they need to be. These parts are better hand-crafted.
Oddly, this is exactly the type of person for whom AI will result in a failure. You can get AI to generate this bit and instantly know how to integrate it and if it's got a major error/oversight.
I literally tried to do this with a 9V battery and a vape cartridge (simple resistance load) to jerry-rig a vape whose power source had died but the rest worked fine. I had a box of all the most common op-amps, transistors, and some voltage regulators. Also plenty of other passives on-hand, pretty much anything that could be needed. I asked a variety of AI's including ChatGPT-4 and Flux.ai to design this for me. But none of them worked for providing enough current, or even generally the right voltage.
And I didn't know enough about electronics to know what wasn't working.
I use AI a lot in software programming. But I use it for the basic, boring boilerplate stuff that I just don't want to type. It frees up my time and brainpower to spend on the hard parts with trickier data structures and algorithms where there's no "right" answer, just different trade-offs. Using AI for the simple stuff is easy because I can quickly read the code that is output and instantly find any errors before I copy/paste it into my work. But if I ask the AI to make something complicated, it can take awhile for me to see where the errors are, or that there's a subtle structural problem with the architecture that's making things far more complex than they need to be. These parts are better hand-crafted.
>But I use it for the basic, boring boilerplate stuff that I just don't want to type.
The boilerplate isn't stuff you generally need AI for really if you are working professionally in electrical. You just pull-up a premade "design block" your company has standardized on.
One of the big things in electrical is you aren't reinventing the wheel each time in your design once you have products going. You re-use parts especially to get long term economy of scale pricing benefits from part vendors by using the same parts more often. This is for everything from ICs to capacitors.
These design blocks extend so far that not only could you drop in pre-made schematic circuits but also premade layout chunks in the CAD tools.
That's if you don't just open an existing schematic and just rename it to your new schematic and make changes hah
And once your overall design gets boilerplate enough, you just get outsourced. It's why no consumer and industrial power supply module design occurs in the US. That stuff has been outsourced to basically 3 or 4 Taiwanese and Chinese OEMs that just copy and paste the same design into different form factors.
The boilerplate isn't stuff you generally need AI for really if you are working professionally in electrical. You just pull-up a premade "design block" your company has standardized on.
One of the big things in electrical is you aren't reinventing the wheel each time in your design once you have products going. You re-use parts especially to get long term economy of scale pricing benefits from part vendors by using the same parts more often. This is for everything from ICs to capacitors.
These design blocks extend so far that not only could you drop in pre-made schematic circuits but also premade layout chunks in the CAD tools.
That's if you don't just open an existing schematic and just rename it to your new schematic and make changes hah
And once your overall design gets boilerplate enough, you just get outsourced. It's why no consumer and industrial power supply module design occurs in the US. That stuff has been outsourced to basically 3 or 4 Taiwanese and Chinese OEMs that just copy and paste the same design into different form factors.
I'm absolutely not an "AI" fanboy/believer, but tasks like parsing design sheet PDFs and producing boilerplate schematics are absolutely within the realm of current LLMs, given enough guardrails.
My first concern would be the internal resistance of the 9V battery.
I've spoken to your team and spent a bit of time using it, I have given this feedback to them as well.
Kicad is a long way from being usable for high speed boards and Flux is currently far less usable than that.
I am sure Flux might be 3-5x more productive for folks slapping an ESP32 and some LEDs down on 2 layers, but it's basically impossible to do any kind of real board with substantial power delivery or high speed routing. I can't even imagine trying to route a 8L board with Flux, much less a 20L board with HDI (can you do HDI?)
Cool beginnings, but ultimately DOA from the difficult fact that I am not going to lock up my business's IP in your proprietary web service. I don't know how you are going to ever get past this particular sticking point: at least with Altium, I have a SchDoc I can parse when things go south - and an offline copy of the software.
Kicad is a long way from being usable for high speed boards and Flux is currently far less usable than that.
I am sure Flux might be 3-5x more productive for folks slapping an ESP32 and some LEDs down on 2 layers, but it's basically impossible to do any kind of real board with substantial power delivery or high speed routing. I can't even imagine trying to route a 8L board with Flux, much less a 20L board with HDI (can you do HDI?)
Cool beginnings, but ultimately DOA from the difficult fact that I am not going to lock up my business's IP in your proprietary web service. I don't know how you are going to ever get past this particular sticking point: at least with Altium, I have a SchDoc I can parse when things go south - and an offline copy of the software.
0: https://www.reddit.com/r/diypedals/comments/14bz17c/comment/...