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

by AdamH12113 • 2 years ago

81 65 2 years ago

renesas.com

stefan_• 2 years ago

This is like a console maker buying a game studio (think Microsoft buying Blizzard). There really are no "good for customers" synergies here.

NikkiA2• 2 years ago

A 'broader market' may well mean it's no longer $20,000 per seat.

beambot• 2 years ago

They really should just shift to a usage-based model billed hourly...

jollyoldpirate• 2 years ago

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.

phendrenad2• 2 years ago

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.

reaperman2• 2 years ago

KiCad 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/...

NikkiA2• 2 years ago

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.

jacquesm3• 2 years ago

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.

Aurornis3• 2 years ago

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.

bsder4• 2 years ago

Anybody who needs real PCB features isn't using Alitum. They're using Mentor Xpedition or Cadence Allegro.

_fizz_buzz_• 2 years ago

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/

quatrefoil• 2 years ago

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.

tverbeure2• 2 years ago

How does Altium compare against Cadence Allegro?

rcxdude• 2 years ago

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.

numpad0• 2 years ago

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.

bsder4• 2 years ago

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.

vrinsd4• 2 years ago

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.

1letterunixname3• 2 years ago

Altium could always get worse. Renesas could be bought by a private equity firm.

m00x3• 2 years ago

Do you have any data to back up that take or are you just spewing FUD for no reason?

sitkack• 2 years ago

I liked it so much I bought the company.

dvdkon• 2 years ago

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.

jacquesm3• 2 years ago

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.

twarge• 2 years ago

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/

imtringued• 2 years ago

Here you go: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hNHTwpegFBw&t=4700

nudgeee2• 2 years ago

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.

vrinsd4• 2 years ago

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.

nudgeee2• 2 years ago

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.

markwu2001• 2 years ago

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

rock_hard• 2 years ago

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

151553• 2 years ago

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.

m00x3• 2 years ago

They have to start somewhere. Give them time, they'll end up working on it.

delfinom5• 2 years ago

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.

reaperman2• 2 years ago

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.

vkdelta• 2 years ago

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

Renesas Buys Altium

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