Both license options include 12 months' software assurance which delivers two major product releases per year, along with continuous updates.
"The current recession is bad at the obvious level," says Emma Lo Russo, "but it's worse on another: it's camouflaging what's already happening. Electronics design is changing. Where it is done is changing. Those who do electronics design are changing. What users demand of electronic products is changing. And if electronics designers, and their organizations, don't change now, they are at risk of not surviving the greater impact of globalization once we're through the recession.
"In fact, the rule book of how electronics design is done, that has served designers well over the past 40 years, is now increasingly inadequate in the face of globalization.
"These old rules increasingly struggle to cope with the new programmable devices, wireless technologies and increasing processing power. The risk to designers is that the old way of doing electronics design will deny them the new opportunities afforded by the convergence of these new technologies.
"The old rules require a divide-and-conquer approach: divide the process into smaller chunks, and conquer the complexity. The problem is that this approach, of reducing the intent and broader view of the design to a set of smaller, granulated problems, kills innovation at the higher level.
"The artificial constraints imposed by having to choose a device or functionality much too early in the design process is bad for design and bad for innovation.
"Our announcements today are all about providing more for less for more: more functionality and access to new devices and technologies than ever before, for less than US$10 a day, making it affordable and easy for more designers around the globe to tap into the opportunity to pioneer the new wave of connected, intelligent, next-generation electronic products."
Altium's new pricing is available now, in the following options:
• US$195 per month purchased as a 12 month contract, totaling US $2,340 per annum per user licence
• US$3,995 per perpetual user licence which includes software assurance for the first 12 months, renewable annually thereafter for US$1500 per user license
Altium has also reduced the price of its desktop NanoBoard NB2, its reconfigurable development platform. The desktop NanoBoard NB2 makes it easy to explore complex design and device trade-offs, move functionality between hardware and software at will, and rapidly develop systems within a graphical drag-and-drop, plug-and-play environment at a cost of US$1,995.