-
- News
- Books
Featured Books
- design007 Magazine
Latest Issues
Current IssueShowing Some Constraint
A strong design constraint strategy carefully balances a wide range of electrical and manufacturing trade-offs. This month, we explore the key requirements, common challenges, and best practices behind building an effective constraint strategy.
All About That Route
Most designers favor manual routing, but today's interactive autorouters may be changing designers' minds by allowing users more direct control. In this issue, our expert contributors discuss a variety of manual and autorouting strategies.
Creating the Ideal Data Package
Why is it so difficult to create the ideal data package? Many of these simple errors can be alleviated by paying attention to detail—and knowing what issues to look out for. So, this month, our experts weigh in on the best practices for creating the ideal design data package for your design.
- Articles
- Columns
- Links
- Media kit
||| MENU - design007 Magazine
DesignHub to Connect Electronics Designers with Industry Partners
September 9, 2015 | SnapEDAEstimated reading time: 5 minutes
SnapEDA, the fastest and easiest way to find and share CAD building blocks for electronics design, has launched the DesignHub, a one-stop shop to explore CAD building blocks for components developed or curated by industry-leading companies. Collaborators in the DesignHub include Texas Instruments, GaN Systems, Accelerated Designs, Octopart, and Seeed.
The DesignHub shaves hours off design time and ensures maximal reusability by making it easy to search, find, and download computer-aided design (CAD) building blocks, such as PCB footprints and schematic symbols, from leading component manufacturers and providers. All building blocks export to major design tools, including Cadence OrCAD/Allegro, Altium, Eagle, Mentor PADS, KiCad, and Pulsonix.
To provide transparency into quality, SnapEDA runs a diagnostic check on each CAD file to catch common manufacturing issues – such as silkscreen-to-copper overlaps, or poorly defined centroids – before they result in costly errors. Additionally a rating system lets engineers approve or flag parts.
The DesignHub was created in response to frequent requests among SnapEDA users for more manufacturer- provided or vetted CAD content to aid in the design of their printed circuit boards (PCBs).
Collaborators in the DesignHub are also popular among design engineers: Texas Instruments is a leading semiconductor company, and the most searched manufacturer on SnapEDA; GaN Systems is at the forefront of gallium nitride transistor technology; Accelerated Designs is a large library creator for the EDA industry; and Octopart and Seeed’s curated parts lists are increasingly common ways of selecting components.
DesignHub collaborators further commented:
“What makes SnapEDA special is their ability to export popular Texas Instruments part libraries into different EDA tools that hardware designers use every day. This helps them find and bring TI parts into their designs faster,” said Mark Easley, TI LaunchPad Applications Engineer.
“Gallium nitride power transistors have moved into the mainstream of adoption as designers dramatically reduce the size, weight and cost of their AC-DC, DC-DC and DC-AC power conversion systems. We are working with SnapEDA to provide designers with speedier access to data on our family of high performance power transistors” said Girvan Patterson, President, GaN Systems. “On-line downloads of design data in file formats compatible with industry standard computer simulation software are critical for GaN Systems’ customers.”
“As one of the driving forces behind the DesignHub parts library, we feel it is a great way to provide the industry with PCB footprint and symbol data that is also vetted by the community. This reduces the chance for costly errors and reduces the time-to-market on new PCB designs. As the creators of the vendor-neutral BXL format, we also believe in giving engineers flexibility to work in whatever CAD tool is required for a design,” said Frank Frank, President of Accelerated Designs.
"The Common Parts Library lets makers and hardware startups move quickly by providing a list of commonly used and widely available components for connected device applications. We're thrilled that SnapEDA has joined the effort by providing symbols and footprints for those parts to help get them into PCB designs quickly,” said Sam Wurzel, CEO of Octopart.
“The open parts library is a collection of the most commonly used components. This library will save time on components sourcing and shorten lead-times on the manufacturing side. We are grateful that SnapEDA has opened all the CAD files to different EDA tools, which will definitely benefit the whole community,” said Eric Pan, CEO of Seeed.
The DesignHub can be explored at www.snapeda.com/libraries/.
About Texas Instruments
Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) is a global semiconductor design and manufacturing company that develops analog ICs and embedded processors. By employing the world’s brightest minds, TI creates innovations that shape the future of technology. TI is helping more than 100,000 customers transform the future, today. Learn more at www.ti.com.
About GaN Systems
GaN Systems is a fabless semiconductor company that is the first place systems designers go to realize all the benefits of gallium nitride in their power conversion and control applications. To overcome silicon’s limitations in switching speed, temperature, voltage and current, the company develops the most complete range of gallium nitride power switching transistors for a wide variety of markets. GaN Systems’ unique Island Technology addresses today’s challenges of cost, performance, and manufacturability resulting in devices that are smaller and more efficient than other GaN design approaches. The company is headquartered in Ottawa, Canada. For more information, please visit: www.gansystems.com
About Accelerated Designs
We focus on providing Vendors, Distributors, Electronic Manufacturers and Engineers with vendor-neutral data for ECAD design, simulation and 3D modeling. The flagship product of Accelerated Designs is the Ultra Librarian, which creates and exports vendor-neutral ECAD data in a format that allows users to customize the data to meet their own requirements and the requirements of their customers. We also provide the industry's largest library of ECAD components, currently at 7.2 million parts and growing monthly.
About Octopart
Octopart is a Y Combinator-backed startup based in New York City that develops search technology to help engineers and scientists build the next generation of electronic devices. Octopart’s flagship product is an electronic parts search engine that is used by hundreds of thousands of engineers to find and compare parts across different manufacturers and distributors.
About Seeed
Seeed is an open hardware innovation platform. We provide open source hardware products and small quantity manufacturing service with a design from manufacturing mindset. We are a strong promoter of the maker movement, value and lifestyle in China, by starting the first maker space and being the host of the full feature Maker Fairein Shenzhen. Headquartered in Shenzhen with operations in San Francisco and Taiwan, Seeed also sits in a unique position to connect between US and Asia’s maker and manufacturing community.
About SnapEDA
SnapEDA is a Web platform that provides millions of ready-to-use building blocks that accelerate electronics design. Built on powerful algorithms, these CAD building blocks can be downloaded instantly to an engineer's CAD software of choice, dramatically improving productivity. SnapEDA provides engineers with unprecedented transparency into the quality of CAD data, catching costly manufacturing issues before they happen. Thousands of engineers and designers in nearly every industry use SnapEDA to build better products faster. Visit www.snapeda.com.
Suggested Items
I-Connect007 Editor’s Choice: Five Must-Reads for the Week
07/11/2025 | Andy Shaughnessy, Design007 MagazineThis week, we have quite a variety of news items and articles for you. News continues to stream out of Washington, D.C., with tariffs rearing their controversial head again. Because these tariffs are targeted at overseas copper manufacturers, this news has a direct effect on our industry.I-Connect007 Editor’s Choice: Five Must-Reads for the Week
Digital Twin Concept in Copper Electroplating Process Performance
07/11/2025 | Aga Franczak, Robrecht Belis, Elsyca N.V.PCB manufacturing involves transforming a design into a physical board while meeting specific requirements. Understanding these design specifications is crucial, as they directly impact the PCB's fabrication process, performance, and yield rate. One key design specification is copper thieving—the addition of “dummy” pads across the surface that are plated along with the features designed on the outer layers. The purpose of the process is to provide a uniform distribution of copper across the outer layers to make the plating current density and plating in the holes more uniform.
Trump Copper Tariffs Spark Concern
07/10/2025 | I-Connect007 Editorial TeamPresident Donald Trump stated on July 8 that he plans to impose a 50% tariff on copper imports, sparking concern in a global industry whose output is critical to electric vehicles, military hardware, semiconductors, and a wide range of consumer goods. According to Yahoo Finance, copper futures climbed over 2% following tariff confirmation.
Happy’s Tech Talk #40: Factors in PTH Reliability—Hole Voids
07/09/2025 | Happy Holden -- Column: Happy’s Tech TalkWhen we consider via reliability, the major contributing factors are typically processing deviations. These can be subtle and not always visible. One particularly insightful column was by Mike Carano, “Causes of Plating Voids, Pre-electroless Copper,” where he outlined some of the possible causes of hole defects for both plated through-hole (PTH) and blind vias.
Trouble in Your Tank: Can You Drill the Perfect Hole?
07/07/2025 | Michael Carano -- Column: Trouble in Your TankIn the movie “Friday Night Lights,” the head football coach (played by Billy Bob Thornton) addresses his high school football team on a hot day in August in West Texas. He asks his players one question: “Can you be perfect?” That is an interesting question, in football and the printed circuit board fabrication world, where being perfect is somewhat elusive. When it comes to mechanical drilling and via formation, can you drill the perfect hole time after time?