Renesas Chooses Altium to Unify Company-Wide PCB Development, Accelerate Solution Design

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Renesas Electronics Corporation, a premier supplier of advanced semiconductor solutions, announced that it has standardized development of all printed-circuit board (PCB) design on the Altium 365 cloud-based platform from Altium, LLC, a global software company based in San Diego, California.

Renesas currently employs multiple PCB design tools across the company, in part because different companies that Renesas has acquired over the past several years have brought their own legacy software into the company. As Renesas integrates components from these different groups into system solutions as Winning Combinations, a uniform PCB design tool will streamline board designs used for demonstrating and evaluating these Winning Combinations and all other product kits, resulting in reduced complexity, improved cost structure and faster time to market.

Renesas’ Winning Combinations are engineering-vetted designs integrating embedded processing, analog, power, and connectivity. They allow customers to take advantage of an elevated platform for their design ideas, accelerating product development cycles and lowering overall risk in bringing designs to market. Renesas now offers more than 400 Winning Combinations for a wide range of customers and markets.

Altium 365 is the leading cloud-based PCB design platform. With Altium 365, users can collaborate with stakeholders and other participants while maintaining IP security and keeping designs under revision control. Users can organize designs, libraries, and participants in one place while sharing links to designs for real-time collaboration. With the use of CAD-specific intelligence, data can be stored and accessed online. Renesas will publish all its products’ ECAD libraries to the Altium Public Vault. With features such as manufacturer part search on Altium365, customers can choose Renesas parts directly from the Altium library for faster time to market.

“Renesas has made a commitment to digital transformation and making the customer design process easier,” said Chris Allexandre, Senior Vice President, CSMO and Head of the Global Sales and Marketing Unit at Renesas. “The ECAD tool migration is an important step in our journey, and we look forward to continuing collaboration and to strengthening our partnership with Altium.”

“This migration tightly aligns with Renesas’ solution and digitalization strategy, which includes Quick-Connect Platforms and other strategic initiatives,” said DK Singh, VP Renesas System and Solution Team. “This development workflow harmonization will enable internal global collaboration and make it easier for customers to integrate Renesas products and solutions into their systems.”

Renesas will continue to offer full support to customers leveraging ECAD design platforms other than Altium and provide ECAD libraries for other ECAD tools as needed by customers. We are strengthening our partnership with Altium, and this ECAD tool unification is the first chapter of our journey as we work on multiple initiatives to strengthen our “broader and deeper” market strategy. 

“Renesas is truly a world leader in the semiconductor business, with one of the industry’s broadest product lineups and a design footprint that spans the globe,” said Marc Boonen, Chief Commercial Officer at Altium. “We are proud that Renesas has chosen Altium 365 as their platform of choice and are looking forward to working together to deliver high-quality integrated solutions faster and less expensively than ever before.”