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Renesas Buys Altium
- stefan_ 3y agoThis is like a console maker buying a game studio (think Microsoft buying Blizzard). There really are no "good for customers" synergies here.
- gswdh 3y ago[dead]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- NikkiA 3y agoA 'broader market' may well mean it's no longer $20,000 per seat.
- beambot 3y agoThey really should just shift to a usage-based model billed hourly...
- exmadscientist 3y agoWith 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!
- jollyoldpirate 3y agoThis 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.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- phendrenad2 3y agoWhy 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.
- reaperman 3y agoKiCad will be even more relevant going forward as Altium quality inevitably craters (ever so slowly) under Renesas leadership. That said, KiCad has a lot of work to do[0] to prepare for that transition period and start wooing Altium customers. Otherwise someone else will have to step in. 0: https://www.reddit.com/r/diypedals/comments/14bz17c/comment/joi88c0/ https://www.reddit.com/r/diypedals/comments/14bz17c/comment/...
- NikkiA 3y agoAltium 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.
- jacquesm 3y agoI 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.
- Aurornis 3y agoKiCad 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.
- bsder 3y agoAnybody who needs real PCB features isn't using Alitum. They're using Mentor Xpedition or Cadence Allegro.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
- sitkack 3y agoI liked it so much I bought the company.
- dvdkon 3y agoLooking 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.
- jacquesm 3y agoI'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.
- twarge 3y agoCurious 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/
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- imtringued 3y agoHere you go: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hNHTwpegFBw&t=4700 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hNHTwpegFBw&t=4700
- nudgeee 3y agoInteresting, 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.
- vrinsd 3y agoWhich 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.
- nudgeee 3y agoIndeed, 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.
- markwu2001 3y agoIt'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
- rock_hard 3y agoSilicon 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 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
- 15155 3y agoI'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.
- delfinom 3y ago
- vkdelta 3y agoWhat 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