Altium’s new prototyping peripheral add-on board

CAMBRIDGE: Altium has come up with a new prototyping peripheral add-on board for its development boards based on NanoBoard FPGA.

The new board, according to Altium, works with both the fully-configurable NanoBoard NB2 as well as the fixed-FPGA NanoBoard 3000.

Altium says its board eliminates the need to create special, custom PCBs for circuit-prototyping: a single on-board connector that plugs into the NanoBoard will give direct access to the I/O on the host NanoBoard FPGA and common NanoBoard resources – TAG lines and power included. Once this is done, designers can integrate custom-circuitry with standard NanoBoard peripherals and services by making use of the vast range of land patterns and plated hole connections on the prototyping boards, in order to build custom hardware fast.

EETimes said in a report that the Altium smart prototyping boards support an array of surface-mount packages in varying pitches and also as thru-hole components on 0.1-inch or 0.05-inch grids.

The pre-defined land patterns for surface mount devices (SMD), the company claims, accommodate pitches of 0.5 mm, 0.65 mm, 0.8 and 1.27mm. Besides, each SMD pad is connected to a 0.5mm hole, which allows simple connections using prototyping wire.

Altium says the smart prototyping board, the systems developed on the NanoBoard 3000, can be deployed in the field – complete with custom-hardware functionality and without having to undergo any manufacturing process.