May 2008
Mistral Solutions Pvt. Ltd., a leading provider of complete technology solutions and professional services in the embedded space has been appointed as a value-added reseller by Altium Limited for their unified electronic product development solutions.

As an Altium partner and authorized distributor of Altium solutions, Mistral will represent Altium in India and provide technical and sales support for Altium Designer and Altium’s Innovation Station, which combines Altium Designer with the Desktop NanoBoard reconfigurable hardware development platform.

Altium’s flagship product, Altium Designer, is the world's leading unified electronic product development solution that allows engineers to take a design from concept to completion within a single application. It unifies board- and FPGA-level system design, embedded software development for FPGA-based processors, and PCB layout, editing and manufacturing within a single design environment. This, combined with modern design data management capabilities, makes Altium Designer a complete solution for electronic product development – a solution that caters for both today's and tomorrow's development needs.

Altium's unified electronic product development solutions help users harness the latest devices, technologies and methodologies allowing accelerated product development timeframes, reduced time-to-market and design and product innovation in ways not previously possible. These solutions enable electronics engineers, designers and developers create more intelligent and innovative electronics products.

“Mistral’s extensive expertise in providing cost-effective, customized computing systems combined with Altium’s experience in electronic design will enable our clients from various industry segments to enjoy the benefits of solutions that excel in quality and accelerate time-to-market. Customers can now have a truly unified electronics design solution, enabling complete electronic product development in a single unified design environment at an affordable price.” said Mujahid Alam, Vice President – Sales, Mistral Solutions.“

“India’s reputation for quality software development continues to grow in global significance which we believe will increasingly apply to the design of intelligent, connected electronic products“ said Emma Lo Russo, Altium’s President and Chief Operating Officer. “Altium believes this is where the future of electronics design lies – in a unified approach that starts with the functionality and the design of the ‘intelligence’ of the device. Altium’s solutions – Altium Designer and the Altium Innovation Station – makes it easy and cost-effective for organizations to equip electronics designers to be successful and innovative.”

“Adding Mistral Solutions to our network of partners in India is another step to ensuring that Indian developers are equipped with the electronics design tools that will give them the edge for the future. Mistral’s extensive sales and support staff qualifies them to perform the full range of Altium sales, after-sales support and training that customers should expect to be successful.”

About Altium

Altium Limited (ASX:ALU) is the leading developer of electronic product development solutions dedicated to unifying the different design disciplines involved in electronics product development. Altium products ensure all electronic engineers, designers, developers, and their organizations take maximum advantage of emerging design technologies to bring smarter products to market faster and easier. Founded in 1985, Altium has headquarters in Sydney, Australia, sales offices in the United States, Europe, Japan, China, and resellers in all other major markets.

For more information, please visit: http://www.altium.com/

May 2008
Committed to its role in facilitating developers to build products that harness the latest technologies, Mistral, a leading product realization company specializing in real-time embedded solutions, announced the availability of the ARM® Cortex™-A8 processor-based development platform, the OMAP35x evaluation module (EVM).

Mistral’s low cost and easy to use development platform is based on Texas Instruments’ offering of new OMAP™ devices which integrate an ARM Cortex-A8 processor. The OMAP35x EVM is an ideal software development and device prototyping platform for users to start immediately on their multimedia-based application device development.

Features of ARM Cortex-A8 microprocessor
The superscalar Cortex-A8 processor is the first ARM processor to incorporate all the new technologies available in the ARMv7 architecture. These include the ARM Thumb®-2 technology for enhanced code density and performance, TrustZone® technology for securing sensitive data and DRM, and NEON™ technology for multimedia and signal processing.

By coupling TI’s DSP technology with the superscalar 600MHz Cortex-A8 processor, the OMAP35x applications processors will enable a wide range of applications, including portable navigation devices, Internet appliances and portable patient monitoring devices that require robust digital signal processing and control capabilities. For more information see http://www.ti.com/omap35xpr.

Powered by the high performance ARM Cortex-A8 processor, Mistral’s OMAP35x EVM will enable full-internet experience for on-the-go devices, helping users to gain faster access to databases, spreadsheets, presentations, e-mail, audio and video attachments, web browsing and videoconferencing applications.

Mistral and ARM Partnership
Mistral, a member of the ARM Connected Community, has worked extensively on ARM technology, having executed designs based on ARM industry-leading technology including the ARM7™, the ARM9™ and the ARM11™ processor families and now the superscalar Cortex-A8 microprocessor. Some of the ARM processor-based product designs implemented by Mistral include those for navigation, hand held devices, smart phones, connected mobile devices, IP cameras and surveillance gadgets among others.

“This is one of the first development boards available for the ARM Cortex-A8 processor. It will be instrumental in enabling designers building next generation power optimized portable devices. It will be a major boost for demanding consumer applications, which will stand to gain from the enhanced audio, video, networking and graphics processing capability while utilizing low battery power” said Samyeer Metrani, VP-Services (USA), Mistral Solutions. The Development Platform will support Linux and Windows Embedded OS”.

"The EVM offered by Mistral and TI’s decision to make Cortex-A8 processor-based ICs available to the broad market with the OMAP35x devices, are exciting moves that are opening many new areas of opportunity for ARM," said Eric Schorn, VP Marketing, Processor Division, ARM. "The ARM Cortex-A8 processor and supporting technologies bring unprecedented levels of performance and energy efficiency to new markets such as home entertainment, portable media, navigation and other markets resulting in innovative new devices with media-rich applications coming to the consumer."

Apart from the Development Platform, Mistral’s customized services for ARM architecture include device driver development, board support packages, firmware development, product designs and embedded application porting, integration and development.

For more information and pricing details visit: http://www.mistralsolutions.com/OMAP35x

About the ARM Connected Community
The ARM Connected Community is a global network of 400+ companies aligned to provide a complete solution, from design to manufacture and end use, for products based on the ARM architecture. ARM offers a variety of resources to Community members, including promotional programs and peer-networking opportunities that enable a variety of ARM Partners to come together to provide end-to-end customer solutions. More information can be found http://www.arm.com/community

May 2008
Mistral Solutions Pvt. Ltd., a leading provider of complete technology solutions and professional services in the embedded space, today announced the availability of the XMC-710 XMC mezzanine module, a NVIDIA G73M-based graphics display control card from Curtiss Wright. Designed for use in VME, VPX and CompactPCI systems, the XMC-710 provides system integrators with an integrated high performance graphics display controller ideal for demanding graphics and video applications.

The XMC-710 graphics controller is the first rugged Mil/Aero COTS XMC to make use of the industry leading NVIDIA G73M GPU delivering OpenGL Processing at PCI Express Data Rates. The card is also supported with a 128-bit local frame buffer interface with up to 512 MB DDR2 frame buffer.

The graphics accelerator offers highly integrated software, including Curtiss-Wright’s Graphics Software Suite (GSS) and Seaweed System’s Seawind/GL/GN /GL/GN X/OpenGL software to speed and optimize use of the high performance graphics engine.

The XMC-710 is a VITA 42.3, PCI Express based XMC form factor, ruggedized, high-performance, dual output, graphics controller with video capture capability. The extensive video capture and processing capabilities, user defined video modes and enhanced bandwidth of PCI Express of the XMC-710 equips it with the features and flexibility to meet specialized requirements of safety critical applications used in the defense and aerospace industry.

About Curtiss-Wright Controls Embedded Computing
Curtiss-Wright Controls Embedded Computing is the industry’s most comprehensive and experienced single source for embedded solutions, ranging from Processing, Subsystems, Data Communication, DSP, and Video & Graphics to the most advanced board level components and fully integrated custom systems. The Embedded Computing group serves the defense, aerospace, commercial and industrial markets and is part of Curtiss-Wright Controls Inc. For more information about Curtiss-Wright visit www.cwcembedded.com.