Mentor Graphics’ PADS Platform Bridges Design and Manufacturing

Estimated reading time: 23 minutes

Matties: It's more about bringing automation in to eliminate that though, because we don't want to throw more people at it. What we want to do is throw technology at it, right?

Musto: China is perhaps a little bit behind on that curve, whereas in North America and Europe, you have more openness to that kind of shift happening faster. In places like China and India, where labor is less costly, you still have the ability to throw manual labor at solving complex problems. It's definitely starting to change, and we're starting to see that change.

Matties: Are they just waiting for the right tool, what's the roadblock? Is there a cultural difference to how you're approaching this?

Musto: It's an evolving process. In the United States there's gravitation towards a higher degree of automation when provided superior technology to perform a task. It’s really difficult to deal with a lot of these design challenges today in a pure manual process. Automation takes on a different feel. It's not like, "Oh, I'm going to take my board and throw it into an autorouter tonight, I'll come in in the morning and it'll be all routed," because it's not going to be routed to a point that will meet all of the design intent. There are different ways of approaching it, such as isolated automation.

One method we've seen to be very successful is our feature called the Sketch Router. This allows you to take groupings of nets, whether it’s a byte lane or a number of byte lanes in an interface, and be able to sketch a path. Then it would automatically solve and route all the paths. It's a huge time saver if you have a large BGA device, or something similar, that you're routing.  We are seeing a higher utilization of interactive automation rather than full automation. Also, bringing some of the simulation and manufacturing checks that have traditionally been accomplished later in the design cycle, much further up in the design process, has been a huge time saver for design teams. It's about completing that design and having it correct at the back end. In the past, they would do a design and then pass it off to PCB layout. Well, there would be 20 ECOs in the middle of all that, which would create disruption, and then that design would go out and they would catch simulation and manufacturing errors and the design would have to go back. Bringing manufacturing check automation and simulation upfront reduces that substantially.

Matties: It sounds like Mentor is headed in the direction of more automation, with an aging population here and no pipeline filled with youth. It seems like there's either going to be this big push to recruit or a big push to automate, but it's going to be a big issue.

Musto: I think we're going to see a convergence of both. I think the PCB designer will be a very valuable asset 10 years from now because there are going to be so few.

Matties: Where do you go to learn about it? It's not a trait that people are really seeking out.

Musto: I don't know if this is a trend, but we're definitely seeing more designs that aren't typically ground up from scratch.  You don't start with a blank schematic for instance. Many, many designs today start somewhere, with something that's been done and proven.

Another way that we'll reach higher efficiency, better predictability, and lower risk, is by being able to reuse tried and true IP blocks in a particular design. In fact, one company that I've talked to actually uses their best engineers solely to design modules. Those modules are IP blocks, they get stored in a library and then those IP blocks are managed and distributed through their enterprise. When you bring in these IP blocks and look at how the world is changing, the IP blocks are not just logical blocks—they're also physical blocks. Even the PCB design piece of it can be reused and instantiated on a new design.

This was a big shift in the IC world and it will be interesting to see if PCB follows that, with companies selling IP now, and they sell soft IP and hard IP, and it's the same thing. Will there be the availability of these soft IP blocks where it's just the logic, or a combination of the logic and the physical implementation of it? It’ll be interesting to see if that happens.

Matties: That's going to affect your business one way or another, but you're going to be prepared for it, that's the idea.

Musto: Exactly. That's our challenge. We have to keep current on technology and market trends to ensure we have the right solutions at the right time to enable our customers to successfully complete their product development.

Matties: Considering that you have such a foundation in all these assets, I'm very curious what you see down the road, since these are problems that we're going to have to deal with as an industry.

Musto: We have to understand how customers are beginning to work their way through this change and how they want to function differently going forward. It's like design IP, if you have a company now focused on not designing everything from scratch, but on doing buildable blocks.

We’re starting to see that already in the IoT space. You can get numerous, different building blocks, put them together, and then you have IP around sensors, a processor, around memory, and maybe around Bluetooth or a WiFi module.

Matties: The trick is pulling it all together from every resource; who is doing that? Who's building that library for everybody to have this?

Musto: It follows the IC model and that's exactly the biggest issue in the IC space right now. I have this IP from these separate vendors, I'm targeting it towards a specific foundry, but how do I bring it all together to make sure it's right? That's where the whole issue of design verification becomes critical.

The changes to the design process itself, as a software supplier and EDA vendor, are what we have to understand and realize that companies are going to have massive libraries of IPs. It's not just about components anymore; it's going to be how do we manage IP blocks? If I make a change to an IP block, how do I alert the quality department who's going to trace where that IP block has been instantiated?  What designs, what's out in the field, what is the quality feedback that we're receiving from the field on that particular IP block, and how do we do updates? It changes that whole dynamic of the design process. Again, it goes back to that infrastructure to tie the various teams and groups together so that they can share this information.

Matties: Is there anything that we haven't talked about that you think we should discuss?

Musto: There's a significant evolutionary change, especially in the mainstream market. These are companies that don't have PCB design specialists and experts, and there's a tremendous amount of innovation and entrepreneurialism going on out there. There are start-ups everywhere, and these are pretty small entities. That is also going to drive some of the changes we see in the future, in terms of the type of people that make their way into the industry, and the profile of our end-users in these large enterprise corporations, because they're going to be a lot more self-sufficient.

If I'm creating a start-up, I don't go out and hire a PCB layout guy, a design engineer, and an SI specialist. I just don't have the resources to do that. I'm going to do it all, and that's what we're seeing. Those companies evolve to mini enterprises, and then they grow up to be enterprises. Hopefully, we will be right there to work with them through that transition. Those enterprises are going to function a lot differently in the future, relying more on these IP blocks and being able to manage all that information. That's the value that we can provide, to help them manage that collection and the complexity of data and information that they have in their environment.

At Mentor, our PCB Tech Leadership Awards are a distinction because they provide us with trend data. We actually reach out to our customers who are using a broad swath of our technologies, and it's a competition that we hold every year. From that, we have visibility into vertical segments to understand the complexities that they face. This also gives us some guidance of what we need to do to create better solutions for our customers. That's really another distinction.

Matties: Nothing like having data to guide your path forward, right?

Musto: It's really useful data and we've provided these design awards for the past 28 years. It gives us a peek into each and every customer who enters.

Matties: I was going to ask if we could get design information because it would be really good to see the trends.

Musto: To look way back in 1990, at something compared to today’s designs, it's amazing.

Matties: And what the issues were back then and be able to talk about how they've evolved and what the issues are today.

Musto: As a leader in the PCB systems business, this allows us to do a lot of retooling and new product development. As a segue, we'll be reaching out to I-Connect007 shortly because we have many new technologies to talk about.

Matties: Thank you so much for your time today.

Musto: Thank you.

• < Previous Page