What’s New in EDA: The Experts Discussion

Estimated reading time: 1 minute

To ring in the new year with this month’s issue, we wanted to find out what’s new in the world of EDA software. Joining us on our experts conference call were Polar Instruments Managing Director Martyn Gaudion, DownStream Technologies founder Rick Almeida, and Director of Product Management Mark Hepburn and Product Management Group Director of Allegro Enterprise Products Hemant Shah, both with Cadence Design Systems. In a lively conversation, the group discussed the challenges and opportunities they see in our industry, as well as the need to bring new blood into the PCB design community.

Andy Shaughnessy: Thank you all for joining us during this short holiday work month. Basically, tell us what's new with your companies for the next year or so. Do you want to start with Cadence, Mark?

Mark Hepburn: Sure. One of the things that we're working on is driving the need for moving the industry from more of an authoring-centric world, especially how we capture designs and work with them, into an analytic space.

The PCB touches many parts of the extended ecosystem, and as an industry we need to get a lot of information to the engineers, at their fingertips. We can’t stop there, and the converse of that is that we need to get information about the design and design process back out to the enterprise. What we're doing is bringing in capabilities that enterprise has dealt with for a long time, technologies like datamarts, business intelligence, analytics and predictive analytics, making that accessible to our customer base.

So the way that formalizes is around our new product, Allegro Pulse. Essentially, it's a datamart that collects information about all the design data that's managed in an environment; whether it be the work-in-process design data management, or information about the library, we characterize all that information into a datamart behind the scenes in near-real time, and then present it back out in a number of different actionable forms such as dashboards, KPIs, reports and notifications.

To read this entire interview, which appeared in the January 2018 issue of Design007 Magazine, click here.