Printed Circuit Design & Fab - July 2008 - (Page 22)

SYSTEM dESiGn Creating differentiated products products often requires the use of the most advanced technologies. IC and FPGA offerings continue to advance following Moore’s law. Data transfer rates in the multi-gigabit per second range and pin counts in the thousands per package create PCB design problems. Implementing these high-speed, high-density components requires the use of advanced PCB fabrication technologies like HDI and microvias, and embedded passives in order to fit and route all the components onto the PCB. Meeting interconnect delay signal integrity constraints adds to the complexity, as many designs now have 50 to 80% high-speed nets. Another trend we see rapidly emerging in many industries is the use of RF circuitry incorporated into an analog and digital board. Long present in the military and aerospace industry, this technology is now prevalent in wireless telecom, automotive, medical, industrial, and consumer goods. These system designs may contain several sections of RF that are tightly packed into sections of an analog or digital board, as illustrated in FiGurE 1. nies, organizational boundaries and lack of communication capabilities between the various disciplines creates “silos” (FiGurE 2) that tend to isolate potential teams and create development process inefficiencies. A company’s aggressive business needs requires product developers to meet not only higher productivity goals within all of the design and manufacturing disciplines, but also improve efficiency between all of the design and manufacturing disciplines. This in the face of increasing complexities in the product designs itself, and the fact that these various organizations may be spread around the country or even the world. Some of the burden falls to EDA suppliers like Mentor Graphics who must not only provide incremental improvements in their functionality, but also supply innovative new technologies that enable quantum leaps in productivity and process efficiency. Some of these “leaps” must extend outside of the PCB design domain and form bridges (or a collaborations) between PCB design and the other disciplines in the development process. Collaboration – Intellectual Property Management and Access. A company’s intellectual property (IP) comes in many forms including component libraries, reusable design data, design-in-progress data, constraints (high speed and manufacturing) and design intent, design and manufacturing best practices, preferred tool flows, etc. IP is of little use unless it can be managed and made available to all members of the design team on a timely basis. Electronic CAD (ECAD) data management systems integrated with PLM and ERP systems must provide the necessary management of and access to the IP. Collaboration – Between eCAD Disciplines. Most competitive designs contain one or more high-speed, highdensity ICs or FPGAs. As previously noted, an increasing number of designs now contain a mixture of RF incorporated into analog and digital sections of a PCB. Providing the ability for these various disciplines to collaborate on a product design can significantly improve the productivity of the individual designers, and also produce a more competitive product. For example, being able to assign the I/O pins on an FPGA in the context of the PCB (versus independently without consideration for PCB interconnect) can significantly reduce routing lengths, improve performance, reduce PCB designer routing time, and can even reduce PCB cost by reducing the number of board layers. In the past, RF design was performed independently of the PCB design. Recently, RF design and simulation specialty products have been closely integrated with analog and digital design systems to create a collaborative team environment, as shown in FiGurE 3. Collaboration – Beyond eCAD. Extending collaboration into other disciplines beyond electronic design can also make a big difference in process efficiency. An example is to create a collaborative environment where the ECAD and MCAD designers communicate during the design process electronically rather than using paper. The typical method of paper communication to proposed changes, either from the ECAD engineer or the MCAD JULY 2008 PCB Design – The Center of the Universe? Most PCB designers tend to focus solely on the PCB design problems and processes, but product design requires much more than the PCB. To meet our companies’ business needs we must consider productivity and process efficiencies in the complete product development process. In many compa- PCB designer PCB designer (DK00646) How does joining one of Denmark’s largest PCB design team and using the most advanced tools available to manufacture top-of-the-line industrial electronics sound? Perhaps you are the new PCB designer we are looking for at Danfoss Drives. It is the perfect challenge for your skills in PCB layout, schematic entry and high speed digital and analogue design. Based at our product development department at our factory in Gråsten you will play an important part in designing the printed circuit boards we use in our solutions and preparing them for production. Interested? Click and see the full job description at jobs.danfoss.com Danfoss Drives is one of the most signi cant manufacturers of variable speed drives in the world, with headquarter located in Denmark, and production facilities in both Denmark, US and China. 22 printEd circuit dESign & fAB http://jobs.danfoss.com http://jobs.danfoss.com

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