"Better Design Productivity" Pervasive at Board-Design Show
TechOnLine
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It's nice to attend an EDA-centric conference and exhibition
where, instead of touting the "latest and greatest" design
tools, EDA vendors promote ways of improving current design
methodologies. PCB Design West, held March 18-22, 2002 in Santa
Clara, CA, was such a show. Several vendors with whom I met
focused on new tool bundles, enhancing collaborative design
environments, and moving high-end design activities, such as
high-speed board design, into the mid-range design realm.
Tool Suites Meld Design and Layout
Cadence originally purchased rival PCB design-tool vendor
Orcad for two reasons"to obtain tools and technology targeted
towards the mid-range (mainstream) PCB design market
(complementing Cadence's high-end, or power-user, tools) and to
bring in-house proven Web-based PDM/CIS technology. Since the
acquisition, Cadence has made only modest inroads in appealing
to mid-range PCB designers. To change this situation, the
company has introduced the Orcad Unison Suite, a four-tool
bundle covering PCB design flow from schematic entry through
board routing. The Windows-based package includes three tools
with Orcad pedigrees"Orcad Capture for design entry, PSpice A/D
for analog and mixed-signal simulation, and Orcad Layout for
board design (layout)"and the four-layer SPECCTRA 4U
high-density PCB autorouter. Highlights of the package include
close coupling between Capture and PSpice, including simplified
simulation and cross probing; a pad-array generator for
creating PCB footprints, including the peripheries of ball-grid
array (BGA) packages; and libraries with 40,000 electronic
parts and electromechanical symbols, including 9500 models for
simplified design verification.
Also offering new design-tool bundles is Electronics Workbench, with its Professional and PowerPro
Suites. Professional Suite comprises three existing
tools"Multisim 2001, Ultiboard 2001, and Ultiroute. Multisim
does schematic capture with multiple simulation engines for
Spice and Verilog. Ultiboard is a board-layout tool that
includes mechanical CAD capabilities for part attachment and
alignment to the board. The Ultiroute auto-placement and
autorouting tool handles board designs with up to four layers
and 1400 pins, using a combination of gridded and gridless
routing technologies. PowerPro Suite has all the capabilities
of Professional Suite and adds VHDL simulation (for
programmable-logic devices), RF simulation, co-simulation of
VHDL with Spice, and a board capacity of 65 layers. Both Suites
also include GerbTool computer-aided manufacture (CAM) software
in Ultiboard 2001, which designers use to optimize and prepare
layout data for the board manufacturing process.
Altium discussed two new developments at PCB
Design, previewing a new PCB design suite, Protel DXP, and
implementing the ODB++ EDA/CAD-to-CAM (Computer-Aided
Manufacturing) format interface across the company's
board-design products. DXP comprises design capture, Spice
3F5-compliant simulation, and board layout and editing in a
single design environment. You can run Spice from your
schematic perform and do signal-integrity analysis from the
layout editor. DXP includes the company's Situs autorouter,
incorporating shape-based routing and a topological
board-analysis step within the autorouter. Benefits of Situs,
according to Altium, are a smaller database, higher
route-completion rate, and faster routing. Other noteworthy
features of the PCB design suite are the addition of VHDL
design entry, enhanced error checking, support for multiple
board variants from a single source-file set, hierarchical
multi-channel design support, and inclusion of
project-management features. By inputting ODE++ formatted data
into DFM and CAM processes, PCB designers can pass important
design information directly into PCB manufacturing operations,
accelerating project cycle times and eliminating several other
files normally needed for manufacturing data transfer.
High-Speed Design Goes Mainstream
A second Cadence "bundling" involves enhancements to the
company's SPECCTRAQuest Signal Integrity Expert, Allegro
layout, and SPECCTRA autorouter tools. Highlighting the
enhancements is Cadence's claim that its enhanced tools let the
PCB designer efficiently analyze differential interconnect,
used in high-speed applications, across the chip, chip package,
and board. Signal Integrity Expert now lets you analyze
differential signals as a single unit instead as two separate
lines, in both pre- and post-simulations in SPECCTRAQuest. The
new release of SPECCTRAQuest also handles, for the first time,
encrypted HSpice models in design kits. With HSpice, designers
can incorporate high-accuracy transistor-level models in their
simulations, concurrently design chips and boards, and also
save time and effort in translating and validating
HSpice-to-IBIS models. However, you cannot simulate HSpice and
Cadence models simultaneously in SPECCTRAQuest. Additional
improvements to the autorouter include new interactive routing
capabilities and new recursive autorouting algorithms for
better manufacturability.
Innoveda has beefed up PowerPCB, the company's
constraint-driven, shaped-based PCB routing tool, with
high-speed capabilities. PowerPCB 5.0 has the BlazeRouter HSD
option that lets the tool do automatic batch routing with
high-speed constraints. Another addition to the routing tool is
FIRE (Fast Interactive Route Editor), which helps layout
designers route parts of their designs. PowerPCB lets you do
interactive routing of differential pairs, including length
matching, trace-length monitoring, and routing according to
minimum and maximum route lengths. At this time, you can
calculate differential-pair delays but not potential
signal-integrity problems. An Advanced Packaging Toolkit in
BlazeRouter helps you with single-chip, multi-chip, and
chip-on-board design issues such as wire-bond creation, trace
routing, and power rings.
Collaborative Software Connects Design-Team
Members
Helping PCB engineers increase design productivity with
existing tool suites is the goal of Ohio Design Automation. Towards this goal, the company
announced enhancements to Ohio's InterComm design data browser
and an integration of InterComm with MatrixOne's Internet-based
collaboration and e-business services platform, eMatrix.
InterComm is Ohio's groupware tool for visualization of and
collaboration on schematics and board layouts. Users access a
secure web page to review, add comments to, and generate Excel
spreadsheet reports on design files without the need for a
schematic capture or PCB layout tool. New to InterComm is the
addition of artwork overlays, allowing users to dynamically
merge a layout database with final artwork images for
manufacturing artwork inspection. The tool supports ODB++ and
Gerber formats, and helps users evaluate manufacturing artwork
enhancements such as geometry padding, pad shaving, and
etch-trap removals, among others. If you spot a problem when
comparing the overlay with the design layout, you can redline
the anomaly.
Combining InterComm with eMatrix lets designers use the
Internet to share electronic design data among different users
in the PCB design and supply chains. A user checks out a design
from the product data management (PDM) "vault"; uses InterComm
to browse, query, and annotate the design; and then employs the
eMatrix platform to communicate ideas and issues with other
project-team members by "checking-in" the annotations file back
to the PDM system.
With several products on the market, e4eNet provides
software for on-line product development and project
management. The company's recently announced software version
3.0 lets users securely share information on product
development and manufacturing within an organization. Users can
review, annotate, and share design data independent of software
application and hardware platform. In addition to visualizing
mechanical and electronic CAD data, similar to Ohio's
InterComm, e4eNet's tools also provide a proactive
project-change notification and a hierarchical inter-group and
inter-company project management capability. Newly announced at
PCB Design is the addition of 3D mechanical design capabilities
to the company's Mechanical Data Manager. Users can view,
measure, annotate, and share mechanical 2D and 3D mechanical
drawings, both inside and outside company firewalls. The tool
supports over 75 drawing formats including Pro/E, Catia, and
UniGraphics.
