TORONTO -- (Marketwire) -- 11/06/12 -- Upverter, the cloud-engineering platform for rapid hardware design, today announced it has publicly released a new major version, including a number of much sought after features centered around physical design and prototype manufacturing.

In addition to previously available collaborative schematic capture, community part maintenance, and design sharing features, Upverter has added a host of critical new features:

• PCB layout, footprint generation, and manufacturing Gerber file export;
• Simulation, design rule checking and verification;
• Prototype manufacturing, bill-of-material management, and order fulfillment;
• Improved part maintenance and the addition of generic parts;
• Improved community exploration and design discovery;
• Improved net layout and auto-routing features.

These features put the Upverter platform amongst the top professional ECAD packages available on the market today. Developers can start using Upverter, for free, at http://www.upverter.com.

Upverter is making product design cycles faster, by solving the three most critical problems getting in the way of hardware product companies, namely:

• Lack of accessibility; less time spent in the tools equals longer lead-times.
• Obsolete tool pricing; the high upfront costs are prohibitively expensive.
• Designers are isolated; their lack of community and collaboration slows them down.

Cloud engineering is not a new idea. There are at least two dozen startups and a number of large companies currently converging on it. It has been talked about, and worked on for at least a decade, and yet remains an unsolved problem. The enterprise migration to the cloud is still in the early stages, but Upverter remains the largest actively designing community of electrical engineers, the largest open parts library, and the most advanced cloud-based design platform thus far.

"We believe that we all have the capacity to create revolutionary products. All it takes is aligning our energies towards a common goal. Yet most products don't ship on time -- the friction of collaboration, of communication, of getting access, and of the tools themselves all gets in the way," said Zak Homuth, co-founder and CEO of Upverter. "To take the next step in product development, we needed a fresh start. We created Upverter to help take that step; to improve the productivity of design teams, to ship product ahead of schedule."

Upverter is free to try. For more pricing information, visit http://www.upverter.com/pricing/.

About Upverter:
Upverter is an effort to re-imagine how products get engineered. We're building the modern way to ship products, together and faster: an enterprise-class, cloud engineering platform that connects everyone with what's going on, their shared priorities, and the design, verification and workflow tools they need to do their jobs.

Based in Toronto and funded by YCombinator, Upverter was founded by Zak Homuth, Stephen Hamer and Michael Woodworth in 2010.

For more information on Upverter, visit http://www.upverter.com/press/.

Add to Digg Bookmark with del.icio.us Add to Newsvine