TechOnLine

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.