Mentor Graphics Launches Xpedition Multi-Board Systems Design Solution

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Mentor Graphics Corporation has announced its new Xpedition multi-board systems design solution which enables seamless concurrent multi-discipline team collaboration to efficiently manage increasing system complexity. The Xpedition flow maximizes team efficiency by eliminating redundant effort during the design process, and optimizes product performance and reliability with a data management infrastructure. This ensures data integrity and leverages reusable IP across all boards, connectors, and cables in the system. 

Designing systems that contain multiple interconnected boards (connectors and/or cables) has traditionally been done with separate uncoupled board and cabling projects held together by desktop office tools such as spreadsheets for intra-board connectivity, text files for system element parameters and drawing applications to show block level system structure and hierarchy. The result is poor collaboration between cross-domain design teams; costly intra-system connectivity errors; extensive time-consuming manual validation steps; and restrictive system change rules that prohibit system design optimization.  This lack of holistic multi-board system design further impacts the ability to design networks of interconnect electronic systems, commonly known as system-of-systems that are commonly seen in automotive, space/satellites, industrial automation and data center infrastructure. 

When designing a leading-edge, high-performance lithography system, with dozens of multidisciplinary teams working in parallel, we face the challenge of ensuring the consistency and correctness of the entire design to meet our challenging time-to-market goals," said Jan van Vlerken, ASML Senior Director  of Electronics Development. "Using Mentor's Xpedition multi-board systems design solution we can design connectivity from the conceptual level down to PCB layout in a single design flow in shorter time, with fewer re-spins, and improved consistency of drawings. 

The new Xpedition multi-board systems design flow improves design team productivity and reduces development cost by replacing inefficient paper and manual processes with an automated, fully integrated, collaborative workflow. The automated synchronization between all levels of abstraction and automated connector management will help design teams achieve time-to-market targets. Signal tracing, functional and signal integrity simulation, and design partitioning and re-partitioning while maintaining connectivity content ensures "correct by construction" system design. The new Xpedition flow is a fully parallel collaborative design environment where global teams can work in "real-time," providing companies with the flexibility and intuitive technologies to develop innovative and competitive products. 

"The management of electronics connectivity is immensely complex and a key challenge for systems architects today, yet this problem hasn't been adequately addressed previously," stated Laurie Balch, chief analyst, Gary Smith EDA. "Mentor Graphics has a leg-up in the market with its robust solution for multi-board systems development based on its breadth and depth of systems design and analysis technologies."