Mentor Graphics’ PADS Platform Bridges Design and Manufacturing

Estimated reading time: 23 minutes

Matties: So for PADS, which is a non-enterprise tool, how does it support the design through manufacturing flow?

Musto: With the PADS Product Creation launch, we've restructured the way that we present the tools to our user communities.  Designers can buy into a core flow or a core platform, which is your PCB front-end and back-end design layout portions of it, with all the key functionality required. Some people are doing DDR design, some have low power issues, whereas other might want to roll in a DFM-type check environment to make sure the designs are manufacturable. We've created this PADS base platform where users can buy these modules that can be plugged in as needed, to do more advanced kinds of analysis, including thermal, high-speed simulations for DDR, and DC drop. There is also an electrical DRC checker that enables the user to check signal integrity of the design without the need to be an expert or run simulations. This can be valuable since engineers aren't necessarily signal integrity experts.

Our HyperLynx DRC product encapsulates simulation-based rules in a design rule check fashion, so they're more physically oriented. You can run these rules and it correlates to simulation results, identifies potential errors and issues in your design. You can fix the errors without having to run simulations and analyze wave forms and other kinds of data.

Matties: So part of the strategy is reducing the amount of time from concept to final design as well?

Musto: Absolutely. There are essentially three tiers of product that you can purchase. There's a PADS base standard configuration which is front-end design and back-end design. The PADS Standard Plus configuration incorporates all of your basic front-to-back design capabilities along with high-speed analysis. There's a conductive thermal analysis capability as well. Those are the base platforms. The high- end PADS Professional configuration draws in Xpedition-level capabilities and technology from our enterprise product line. The idea is that you can scale it as a user. If you're just doing a start-up and developing your first design, you might start off with the standard version, but as your designs become more complex, you'll be able to grow and scale your design requirements. Going back to what I was saying before, the modules add another dimension to that.

A customer using the PADS standard version may have a low power issue and will want to analyze the power delivery network. We have a DC drop tool for less than $5,000 to add onto your base configuration to run that kind of simulation. One of the things that we found in the entry-level market is that people don't really have access to those kinds of technologies; they're typically reserved for the high-end signal integrity guys, so they're high-priced and out of reach. We wanted to leverage that technology down into the mainstream for people who are innovators, entrepreneurs, building new technology, next generation technology, and over time, enable them to evolve and grow with the product.

Matties: Mentor offers the Xpedition flow for enterprise customers as well. So are there clear distinctions between both types of customers?

Musto: What makes Mentor different than a lot of the other EDA vendors, in addition to the breadth of our solutions, is that we have different solutions aimed at different market segments. If you're a hobbyist or an entry-level designer who wants a very low-cost solution, you can get that. If you are in the mainstream space, that’s where the PADS product line sits. Then at the enterprise level, we have a set of enterprise tools, with capabilities for a large team environment where many engineers are working on a single project.

We connect all of this technology so that it's scalable, so if you start out in the mainstream you can work your way up to enterprise tools. If your company gets acquired or it evolves into an enterprise-type environment and you need to add elements like library management, data management, and other enterprise infrastructure demands, we can help you every step of the way.

Matties: What do you think are the greatest challenges for a designer?

Musto: Designs are becoming more complex, systems in general are becoming a lot more complex, and you have geographically dispersed teams and engineers. The one thing I keep touching on about the engineering desktop is that the role of the specialist is going away. It's changing where you once had a design engineer, a signal integrity engineer, a PCB layout guy, a manufacturing guy, and you'd have all these specialists within your organization that you could rely on. That doesn't work anymore. There are still a lot of companies that have PCB design groups, but PCB design expertise, in general, is declining.

More importantly, designs are becoming so complex that it requires a lot more upfront design consideration and analysis to get a functional product out the back end. Again, whether you're in a small company, a large company, whether you're using desktop tools or engineering tools, everybody's playing a much larger role in the overall product creation process. Even PCB designers are now being required to run simulation and analysis or at least be able to provide data back to their engineers.

Matties: One of the most common challenges that we hear from designers is they don't have enough time to do their design, they don't have enough real estate to do their design, and they're not brought into the process early enough. It's going over the wall and they often don't have all the data that they need when they start the design. I’ve heard this set of four or five complaints or issues for many years.

Musto: I was going to say, that hasn't changed much in the last 30 years.

Matties: But why not? Why doesn't it change?

Musto: Because as we get faster and more efficient, the demands for being faster and more efficient go up as well.

Matties: That's a foundational change, I think. If you're running a business today and, as you're saying, the designers are so critically important, why aren't we bringing them in sooner?

Musto: That goes to the point where design engineers are required to do a lot more early validation and prototyping on their piece to make sure that, after it gets passed off, there’s less risk that the design's not going to work. Today, designs and systems are becoming a lot more complex, so we have to do things differently. We have situations with a couple of customers who do large multi-board systems that are incredibly complex. In the past, there would be a system architect who would partition the design into its individual elements and boards, then everybody would go off and design their boards, and eventually it all gets connected and hooked together and everything works.

Now it's to the point where if you don't look at this system in its full entirety and context, it's not going to function, it's not going to work, and it’s a heightened risk. Companies are realizing that they cannot afford this risk. They don't want to go down this path with these massive investments in technology and have something that potentially doesn't work at the back end of it. That's driving the change.

Matties: Your tools are really answering that age-old problem to fill that gap with knowledge.

Musto: Yeah, and to make sure that we keep the community of engineers and designers connected—there’s intelligence behind this. In the example that I gave, whether you're working on board A, B, or C, there's some communication and infrastructure that ties those communities together so that if some change happens that might impact design A, there's a link to catch and communicate that change to the other teams.

Page 2 of 4

• < Previous Page
• Next Page >