LiveDesign takes advantage of the re-programmability of FPGA devices and the ready-availability of low-cost, high-capacity, high-performance FPGA’s.

The Altium Designer LiveDesign Evaluation Kit includes a LiveDesign Evaluation Board that can be specified with either a high-capacity Altera® Cyclone™ (EP1C12F324C8) or Xilinx® Spartan®-3 (XC3S1000-4FG456C) FPGA devic e. This versatile development platform not only interacts with Altium Designer but can be used directly with FPGA vendor tools as a standard development board with no requirement for additional hardware or accessories.

The The Desktop NanoBoard takes the nano-level breadboarding concept introduced with the NanoBoard-NB1 to a whole new level, enhancing your ability to design, implement and debug an entire design before moving to the production PCB. Swappable daughter boards now support a much larger number of I/O connections from the target FPGA to the connected peripherals. < br > < br > With the release of the Desktop NanoBoard, peripherals available to the host FPGA are delivered on removable peripheral boards, providing a simple and cost-effective method for rapid prototyping of hardware concepts. Additional peripheralboards continue to be developed by Altium, making it easy to evaluate new and alternate technology options, suchas wireless networking.

Target programmable devices are housed on plug-in daughter boards, enabling engineers to easily change the target project architecture, providing a truly FPGA vendor-independent development board.

As well as providing communications to and from the FPGA, the NanoBoard incorporates a wide range of peripherals such as an LCD, RAM, serial flash memory, keypad and ADC/DAC that can easily be used for application development. Ports on the NanoBoard include PS2, RS232, CAN, VGA, and I2C, as well as a range of general purpose IO headers.

Third-party board support extends to the use of Altium's Universal JTAG Interface (pictured right), which enables your development board to interact 'live' with the LiveDesign-enabled Altium Designer solution. This support can include specific instructions for connecting the board (including images), constraint files and example projects that demonstrate the use of processor cores and virtual instruments.