Altium
software company
Altium Limited is an international software company based in La Jolla, California. Founded as Protel Systems in 1985, it provides electronic design automation software to engineers for designing printed circuit boards. Its products are designed for use in a Microsoft Windows environment and used in industries such as automotive, aerospace, defence and telecommunications. Its flagship solutions are Altium Discover, Altium Develop, and Altium Agile, each of which is built on the unified electronics design software Altium Designer, and Altium 365, a cloud platform that connects stakeholders and centralises data. Altium became a subsidiary of Renesas Electronics in 2024.
History
1985–1991: Early history
The history of Altium dates to 1985 with the founding of Protel Systems Pty Ltd by electronics designer Nicholas Martin. He was working at the University of Tasmania in the 1980s. He saw an opportunity to make the design of electronics product affordable, by marrying the techniques of electronics design to the PC platform. The company launched its first product in 1985, a DOS-based printed circuit board (PCB) layout and design tool. Protel PCB was marketed internationally by HST Technology Pty Ltd.
“Altium” enters the record as software company. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Altium, software and company can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Datasets, specimens, observations and peer-reviewed methods provide the appropriate test for the technical claims summarized here. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1066620. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1985, 2024 and 1991.
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This entry incorporates text from “Altium” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.