Cadence Presents New Software System and Technical Papers at PCB West 2018

Estimated reading time: 12 minutes

Shah: One of the papers covers Industry 4.0 and IPC-2581. We discussed how IPC-2581 is going beyond the handoff to manufacturing and enabling Industry 4.0 automation in building the smart factories of tomorrow. IPC-2581 was always intended to go from design to manufacturer and to the manufacturing floor. We have a consortium of companies—the IPC-2581 Consortium—with 98 PCB design and supply chain companies. We've been doing this since 2011, trying to make sure the standard is right and interpreted correctly. Today, all PCB EDA companies either produce IPC-2581 or consume it, and some that do both. Current information about the support of IPC-2581 is available at www.ipc2581.com.

We've gotten to a point where many companies now use IPC-2581 to build their boards. Some companies have standardized on IPC-2581, which is all they provide. Then there are manufacturing companies that accept IPC-2581 (along with other stuff), but they offer an incentive to companies who provide IPC-2581 because they know it's an intelligent format that makes their process more efficient.

Johnson: Who are the authors for this paper?

Shah: Myself and Michael Ford from Aegis Software. We presented the paper here, and it will be available as part of the proceedings for PCB West.

Johnson: I look forward to reading it.

Shah: There is also a system-level design paper that Gary Hinde from Cadence presented, which introduced the concept of how to do system-level design. We do it a little differently than others because we are focused more on doing it earlier in the cycle, like DesignTrue DFM. We're enabling hardware engineers to do what-if analyses earlier as they're designing the multi-board system. Almost everybody does multi-board systems, but it's important to enable the engineers to make the decisions earlier in the cycle, which is what we’re doing.  

Johnson: Was that paper also presented at PCB West?

Shah: Correct. The third paper we presented at PCB West focused on return path analysis and management for PCB designers. We took some Sigrity technology and embedded it into Allegro so PCB designers can make decisions on critical signals as they're designing. One of them is impedance analysis that enables PCB designers to quickly analyze all signals to ensure that they are meeting the specifications.

The tool then shows you any signal with impedance far above what you had anticipated. A simple example is a signal crossing split planes, which is something that people tend to find manually. They have to go through their design and see if they missed a signal that's crossing a split plane. With this analysis, you can discover where impedances are off the charts within minutes. It has easy to use filters to focus on the impedance ranges that you want to focus on. There's also visual color-coded feedback on the screen to show you that these impedances are different. Some of them could be by design, others could be accidental, but you can manage that.

The second part of the paper addressed return path management. We give you return path visualization based on analysis results, as well as return path management through constraints. For example, you can specify for a critical signal that must have a ground plane above and a power plane below with specific voltages. The DRC system will then check for you, and if you deviate from that, it will flag that it's a design rule violation. Many times, your power plane is slightly off, you’re too close to the edge, and therefore the signal won't work as you expected.

Typically, finding this problem is a manual process. We introduced some rules to let the system know what you expect for critical signals, and then it will check throughout the design process.

Johnson: Great. Can anyone find these papers in the PCB West proceedings?

Shah: Correct. This is a big show for us.

Fernsebner: It is.

Johnson: It certainly has been! Thank you very much for the time.

Shah: Thank you.

Fernsebner: Thank you.

Sponsored Links:

1. Allegro PCB DesignTrue DFM Technology
2. Customer portal for DesignTrue DFM Ecosystem
3. The IPC-2581 Consortium
4. What’s new with Allegro PCB Design?

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