I just heard that Altium has launched a new addition to its NanoBoard family of FPGA-based development boards. Called the NanoBoard 3000, this little scamp is absolutely amazing, not the least that it looks amazingly cool and it comes complete with Altium Designer and extensive royalty-free IP for only US$395

I tell you, as far as I'm concerned, the guys and gals at Altium continue to set the standard for others to follow when it comes to marketing. Who amongst us could forget Dave's Video, for example? And I'm still laughing about their Tech Tonight piece.

Of course we're all too busy to watch these things just for the fun of it all. And that's why the Altium presentations score, because you also learn things while you are watching them. The most recent piece is a Video Introduction to the new NanoBoard 3000. This isn't a humorous piece like the two I mentioned above, but it's very, very informative. And don't automatically "kill" the window at the end of the first video presentation, because if you wait for a few seconds you'll discover that there's a lot more information following along...

And it's not just the presentations that are slick. As you can see in the image below, the NanoBoard 3000 has a very Buck Rogers in the 25th Century feel about it.

Who amongst us wouldn't like a NanoBoard 3000 gracing our desktop?

I know, I know, looks aren't everything... but I tell you, given a choice, I'd rather be creating my designs on a development board that has other engineers who are passing my office screech to a halt and gasp "Oooh, Shiny!" as opposed to a regular looking boarding old development board.

Of course there's no point having something that looks cool but that doesn't do the job. Similarly, you can get something that does the job but is a pain in the rear end to use. And the one thing folks REALLY hate is to purchase a development board that offers promises of delight like a useful peripheral of communications function ... only to discover that although the hardware is there, there's no software driver for the little scamp. Honestly, this happens far more than you would believe.

Happily, the NanoBoard 3000 doesn't fall into any of these camps. If there's one thing Altium have become very good at, it's creating design tools and development environments that come complete-and-replete with everything that you'd expect; also something that you can quickly ramp up and start using to actually create real-world designs.

Which brings us nicely back to the NanoBoard 3000, which is supplied complete with hardware, software, ready-to-use, royalty-free IP, and a dedicated Altium Designer Soft Design license.

Using the NanoBoard 3000, you can construct sophisticated 'soft' processor-based systems inside FPGAs, even if you don't have any prior FPGA expertise. For example, you do not need any specialist VHDL or Verilog skills; instead, you can use existing board layout and systems design skills to construct, test, and implement FPGA-based embedded systems.

The IP libraries and intuitive graphical editors that are central to Altium Designer mean you can simply add processors, memory controllers, peripheral blocks and software stacks. You literally have everything you need to create next-generation, FPGA-hosted embedded systems with off-the-shelf components without having to write HDL or low level driver code.

The first NanoBoard 3000 features a Xilinx Spartan 3AN FPGA. Two more NanoBoards, featuring Altera and Lattice FPGAs, are planned. In all three NanoBoard options, the FPGA is fixed. This distinguishes it from Altium's NanoBoard NB2, which features interchangeable FPGA daughter boards to allow on-the-fly comparisons and testing in a prototype design environment.

Designers using the NanoBoard 3000 will also have the option to deploy their designs in modular commercial enclosures from Altium. Available in a variety of sizes, these will let designers go from prototype to commercial product in one step, simply by snapping the NanoBoard 3000 into the enclosure.

The NanoBoard 3000 is available for a recommended retail price of US$395 and includes a 12-month subscription to an Altium Designer Soft Design License, which also includes all software updates released by Altium during the 12-month subscription period. At the end of this period, licenses can be renewed for the equivalent of $19.95 per month purchased in 12-month blocks. Users of the latest release of Altium Designer can also use the NanoBoard 3000.

Last but not least, you can purchase a NanoBoard 3000 from Newark at: www.newark.com/altium.