Altium to Acquire Octopart and Ciiva

Reading time ( words)

Altium Limited has announced the acquisition of two industry-leading electronic parts content and search providers, Octopart and Ciiva. A definitive purchase agreement has been signed to acquire Octopart, a provider of electronic parts data and specialized inventory search. In addition, a finalized agreement has been signed to acquire Ciiva, a cloud-based electronic component management system that controls and tracks components throughout the product lifecycle management process. These acquisitions will enable Altium to expand their product lineup to include an integrated content strategy for enhanced component management workflows.

“The acquisitions of Octopart and Ciiva represent a significant step forward in the evolution of the Altium content strategy,” said Aram Mirkazemi, CEO at Altium. “Tightly integrated CAD models and part supply information will bring a state change to the way in which parts selection and component management are performed during and after the design process is completed.”

Intelligent Electronic Parts Data from Octopart

The acquisition of Octopart provides Altium with direct access to over 30 million electronic and industrial components, allowing Altium to expand their content offering for users of their PCB design tools. Altium customers will also benefit from an extensive supplier database network provided by Octopart, allowing designers to directly connect to the electronic component distributors and manufacturers.

“We believe that everyone involved in the product development lifecycle can benefit from the bringing together of Altium content and design tool expertise with the Octopart data and search capabilities”, said Sam Wurzel, Octopart Co-Founder and CEO. “We are excited to pursue the opportunity to deliver smart content and actionable supply chain intelligence to makers and design engineers as they develop the next generation of connected devices.”

Cloud-Based Component Management from Ciiva

The acquisition of Ciiva will allow Altium to provide customers with an integrated parts management solution that enables engineers to overcome BOM and component data management challenges. The integration of the tools, content, and services between Altium and Ciiva will empower engineers all over the world with specialized design and data management capabilities throughout the entire product design process.

“Our vision to provide easy access to parts data and to help people overcome common component data management challenges will only be accelerated with our acquisition by Altium,” said Leigh Gawne, Co-Founder and CEO at Ciiva. “By integrating our tools, content, and services with the Altium ecosystem, we’re able to accelerate the reach of our vision and offer a complete component management solution to every engineer around the world."

Availability and Updates

All services and solutions offered by Octopart and Ciiva will continue to operate as usual, with no changes for current customers. Altium will be working closely with Ciiva and Octopart in the coming months to integrate their existing technologies and data management platforms into the Altium ecosystem. Future information about the developments of this integration by can be found on the Octopart blog and Ciiva blog.

About Altium

Altium Limited (ASX: ALU) is a multinational software corporation headquartered in San Diego, California, that focuses on electronics design systems for 3D PCB design and embedded system development. Altium products are found everywhere from world leading electronic design teams to the grassroots electronic design community.

03/23/2023 | I-Connect007 Editorial Team

We’ve heard a lot lately about the need to identify tribal knowledge within our organizations. How do you know whether an “expert” is sharing documented knowledge or it’s just something they learned at their first job during the Carter administration? We asked IPC design instructor Kris Moyer to explain his process for separating the wheat from the chaff, so to speak, in design knowledge. As he points out, a true expert will not be afraid to cite the sources and data sets behind their arguments.

10/20/2022 | Andy Shaughnessy, Design007 Magazine

Supply chain issues are continuing to cause disruptions in our industry, though lead times have dropped from astronomical to merely troublesome. In this interview, Chris Banton, EMA Design Automation’s director of marketing, explains how Cadence’s software has evolved as designers’ needs have changed in the past few turbulent years, including providing designers with component availability data early in the process.

09/15/2022 | I-Connect007 Editorial Team

There’s one lesson that all designers have learned over the past few years: Components might be here today and gone tomorrow, so tracking your parts is more important than ever. Any resources that help you keep tabs on your required parts are invaluable in these days of 40-week lead times. Earlier this year, Altium released one such resource: the Electronic Design to Delivery Index (EDDI) report. Assembled from millions of bytes of data gleaned from the Octopart search engineer and the Nexar platform, the monthly EDDI report provides part availability histories going back years, as well as a real-time snapshot of global inventories.