Altium

Altium develops the software that electronics engineers use to design printed circuit boards. Founded in 1985 in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia as Protel and renamed Altium in 2001, the company is now headquartered in La Jolla, California. Its flagship Altium Designer is one of the most widely used PCB design tools in the industry, paired with Altium 365, a cloud platform for design collaboration and data management, and Octopart, an electronic-component search engine that aggregates parts data from across the supply chain. In August 2024, Altium became a wholly owned subsidiary of Renesas Electronics Corporation, the Japanese semiconductor maker, in a deal valued at roughly nine billion Australian dollars. The combination is aimed at making electronics design more accessible and accelerating software-defined product development: the jointly announced Renesas 365, Powered by Altium platform brings model-based system design, device exploration, and AI-ready development tools together from silicon selection through system lifecycle. Altium Designer itself has added AI-assisted component placement, routing, and parts search, making it one of the more AI-forward tools in electronic design automation.