Вот сижу, гадаю, что бы это значило?

http://www.edn.com/blog/1690000169/post/1810043581.html



Monday, April 20, 2009

Altium cuts prices on their design tool, creating an interesting IP pricing play


The folks at Altium have spent some time now pitching their unique idea for electronics system design: a top-down, drag'n'drop approach that offers the user a huge pool of processor, function, and connectivity IP and software, which the Altium Designer tool assembles into a waiting FPGA more or less before your eyes. By dealing with the mechanics of implementing a platform more or less automatically, the Altium folks claim, they free designers to concentrate on the functional blocks that actually differentiate the design. Once the design is working on Altium's FPGA-based target board, the NanoBoard, there is a direct path to a manufacturable PCB design.

This week Altium, in a further effort to proselytize their idea, announced a rather drastic price cut for several forms of their tool license. For the first time the company is offering an individual license for $195 US per month on a 12-month contract. A single-user perpetual license now costs $3995, including one year of support. After the first year the support charge is $1500 annually per license. The cost of the NanoBoard has also dropped from $2500 to $1995.

This certainly lowers the entry fee for this style of design. Altium product manager Rob Irwin commented that this fee structure was closer to the license fees users expect for FPGA or embedded software tools than what ASIC designers, for instance, might expect.

But the new fee structure seems to have another implication as well. Part of what makes Altium Designer special is the extensive menu of IP in the design environment. This IP gets included in anything you design with Designer, and is royalty-free. So if you license Designer and use it to create a design, you in effect have a perpetual royalty-free license to use the IP in that design.

That makes the $2340 you would pay for a year's license fees, or even the $3995 for a perpetual license, a very cost-effective way to get access to a lot of valuable IP, including a 32-bit RISC core, a number of connectivity solutions, and so forth. It might be an interesting approach for a low-budget design, independent of how you feel about the underlying methodology.