With nearly 700 respondents, the survey can draw a fairly accurate image of the state of pcb design today. Survey respondents said that more than half of their end systems contain three pc boards or more, 54 percent of those boards include at least one FPGA and 36 percent contain one or more ASIC. About half of all pc boards contain six or more layers. The current median clock speed is 97 MHz, while the expected median clock speed in two years is 241 MHz.

It's not surprising, then, that the number of high-speed nets on a board is expected to increase from an average of 21 percent today to 30 percent in 2007. These are generally defined as nets above 100 MHz.

Pcb design teams are spending 24 percent of their time on system-level design, 17 percent on layout, 16 percent on test and manufacturing support, and 14 percent on schematic entry. Signal integrity analysis takes up 7 percent.

Fully 51 percent of the survey respondents do schematic capture themselves, 46 percent do system-level design and 30 percent do pcb layout. Showing that signal integrity is an up-and-coming concern, 32 percent run signal integrity analysis themselves.

The only task that sees frequent outsourcing to third parties is pcb layout, and that's only done at the companies of 15 percent of respondents. The vast majority of that outsourcing takes place in North America.

The most critical current challenge, respondents said, was meeting cost budgets. Next come engineering productivity and signal integrity. Respondents called out signal integrity and complexity as the two things that are getting worse fastest as boards become more complex. Respondents were least concerned about component edge rates, IC package/pcb co-design and IC package parasitics, although they see all of these as worsening problems.

It may not be surprising that most respondents said they, or their design team, use pcb layout and schematic-capture tools. The potential surprise is the high rate of usage of embedded-software development tools (67 percent), analog simulation (64 percent), digital simulation (63 percent), FPGA design tools (52 percent) and mechanical CAD (58 percent) by the same design teams. Some 36 percent said they or their design teams use signal integrity analysis tools.

As with chip designers, pcb designers are most satisfied with the accuracy of their tools (59 percent) and least happy with interoperability (23 percent), cost of ownership (22 percent) and cost of purchase (21 percent). With respect to individual tools, they are most satisfied with tried-and-true schematic capture (56 percent) and least with the emerging field of thermal and electromagnetic-interference analysis (34 percent).

The 10 most-used EDA providers are, in order, OrCAD, Mentor Graphics, Mathworks, Cadence Design Systems, Electronics Workbench, Altium, Agilent EEsof, Ansoft, Zuken and Valor. Highest satisfaction level goes to The Mathworks (61 percent), followed by Valor (57 percent) and Mentor (56 percent).

Likes and dislikes
Pcb designers are "very positive" or "somewhat positive" about technology (70 percent), but not nearly as happy with anything else. At the bottom of the list are licensing (17 percent), interoperability (16 percent) and pricing (14 percent). Some 30 percent agree strongly with the statement "There's too much hype in product rollouts."

While only 5 percent agree strongly with the statement "EDA licensing models work for me," there doesn't seem to be a big disconnect with respect to perpetual vs. time-based licenses. Most respondents use perpetual licenses and most prefer them. But 40 percent also said they use various forms of time-based licenses and only 26 percent would prefer those.

More revealing, perhaps, is the wealth of verbatim comments in which respondents were asked what message they'd most like to pass to EDA vendors. Among the repeating themes were the following: ease of use, lower costs, more flexible licensing, fewer bugs and interoperability.

A number of respondents said they want more flexible licensing schemes so they can work at home, work on the road or transfer data from one computer to another. "I really am about at the point of looking into open-source tools for our pcb layout needs," said one designer who expressed concerns about licensing restrictions.

"Before going after the bells and whistles, make sure the basics work first and are usable," said another designer.

"I would like to see better tool integration for embedded-systems developers who do both hardware and software design, better extensibility for customized work flows and easier licensing methods so I can more easily transfer work from one machine to another," said one respondent.

"Show me a tool I can afford as an engineer," said another. "I am not interested in buying continuing support or dealing with dongles."

"Get the bugs out," said another. "I often waste far more time working around those than the entire project would take if everything worked bug-free."

 See related image