German firm adopts Australian design

Heidelberg Instruments has selected Altium as its electronics design standard.

Designers will develop key components for the next generation of its direct writing laser lithography systems. These will use a focused laser beam to write submicro structures on semiconductor substrates, with areas ranging from a few millimetres to four square metres.

In addition to high-precision mechanical and optical components, a large range of specialised electronic components is needed for the systems. These modules are highly sensitive analog sensor amplifiers, high-current motor drivers and boards to generate and to amplify RF signals.

Former solutions worked with small-scale CPLD devices, but to increase the data rate and volume, Heidelberg will now use FPGAs from multiple suppliers.

The purpose is to generate pixel data for the substrate design, which can be up to several terabytes.

Altium brings together the various disciplines of design so that electronics engineers have an off-the-shelf solution that frees design from the documentation and formatting constraints of traditional point tools.