-
- News
- Books
Featured Books
- design007 Magazine
Latest Issues
Current IssueLevel Up Your Design Skills
This month, our contributors discuss the PCB design classes available at IPC APEX EXPO 2024. As they explain, these courses cover everything from the basics of design through avoiding over-constraining high-speed boards, and so much more!
Opportunities and Challenges
In this issue, our expert contributors discuss the many opportunities and challenges in the PCB design community, and what can be done to grow the numbers of PCB designers—and design instructors.
Embedded Design Techniques
Our expert contributors provide the knowledge this month that designers need to be aware of to make intelligent, educated decisions about embedded design. Many design and manufacturing hurdles can trip up designers who are new to this technology.
- Articles
- Columns
Search Console
- Links
- Events
||| MENU - design007 Magazine
New Mentor Xpedition Platform Delivers 'Shift-Left' Multi-Dimensional Verification
November 15, 2018 | Mentor, a Siemens businessEstimated reading time: 3 minutes
Mentor, a Siemens business, has announced the new Xpedition printed circuit board (PCB) design platform focused on multi-dimensional verification. With the increasing complexities of today’s systems, PCB design managers can be challenged by the lack of robust verification tools and/or the difficulty in applying these tools, to identify problems early in the design development phase. Mentor tools enable engineers to integrate a broad range of easy-to-use verification tools into a PCB design platform within a singular authoring environment to identify problems at the schematic or layout phases. This new Xpedition platform for non-specialist PCB engineers delivers accurate concurrent design analysis and verification, and comprehensive tool integration, helping achieve substantial time and cost savings while delivering higher-quality products.
According to a recent electronics simulation-driven design study by Lifecycle Insights (September 13, 2018), the average number of design re-spins is 2.9 per project, which amounts to approximately 16 days of unplanned development time and $82.6K in additional costs. The study found that PCB design teams who adopted a “shift-left” verification methodology across their design processes realized a 14% increase in on-time project delivery, reduced re-spins, and overall improved design quality.
“Our most recent research shows that the broad use of analysis and verification throughout the design phase directly supports engineering management’s efforts to compress the design cycle while improving board system quality,” stated Chad Jackson, president and principal analyst, Lifecycle Insights. “Mentor's advancements in PCB design simulation solutions is a critical enabler to such efforts, and managers should take a hard look at these offerings."
Authoring Environment for Non-specialist PCB Designers
Leveraging industry best-practice processes, the Xpedition verification platform is designed for non-specialist PCB designers to enable quick and intuitive simulation and analysis functions. Launched within the designer’s authoring tool, integrated verification technologies provide automatic model creation, concurrent simulation, cross probing from results, and error reviews within a single environment.
Multi-Dimensional Verification Solution
The Xpedition platform is comprised of a broad range of robust technologies: schematic analysis, signal integrity (SI) and power integrity (PI) analysis, electrical rule checking (ERC), thermal simulation, vibration analysis, design-for-fab (DFF), assembly (DFA) and test (DFT) manufacturability testing. These integrated technologies, applied within a single authoring environment familiar to the designer or design team, provide early virtual design prototypes. The new Xpedition platform introduces a comprehensive, multi-dimensional solution for upfront design verification, from concept to design hand-off for assured manufacturability.
The new Xpedition verification platform incorporates novel technologies in several areas:
Schematic design verification: new, fully-automated and powerful schematic integrity tool to replace manual visual schematic inspection, eliminating re-spins early in the design by as much as 70%.
Design-for-test analysis: identifies test point requirements that are automatically passed from schematic design to layout as constraints to improve testability coverage. This feature creates test and inspection outputs for machines in process preparation with early diagnostics, thereby lowering the overall cost of testing.
Improved integrations in the new Xpedition platform include:
Design-for-manufacturability (DFM) analysis: provides comprehensive DFM analysis covering fabrication, assembly, test, flex/rigid-flex, substrate and panel validation early and concurrently during PCB design, without leaving the layout in the new Xpedition integration environment.
Electrical performance sign-off: automatic electrical rule checking (ERC) quickly identifies critical signal integrity, power integrity and EMI/EMC issues concurrently with PCB layout, potentially accelerating design reviews from days to just minutes.
“Recognizing that systems design complexity continues to increase, one of Mentor’s key initiatives is to empower our customers with industry-leading verification technologies, which have been historically leveraged in specialized, or discrete instances,” stated A.J. Incorvaia, senior vice president, Mentor Electronic Board Systems. “With our new Xpedition platform targeting PCB designers, these integrated solutions enable verification within the design process to ease deployment, accelerate time-to-results, and allow our customers to maximize their investments.”
About Mentor Graphics
Mentor Graphics Corporation, a Siemens business, is a world leader in electronic hardware and software design solutions, providing products, consulting services, and award-winning support for the world’s most successful electronic, semiconductor, and systems companies. Corporate headquarters are located at 8005 S.W. Boeckman Road, Wilsonville, Oregon 97070-7777. For more information, click here.
Visit I-007eBooks to download your copy of Mentor, A Siemens Business micro eBook today:
The Printed Circuit Designer's Guide to...Power Integrity by Example
Suggested Items
I-Connect007 Editor’s Choice: Five Must-Reads for the Week
05/03/2024 | Nolan Johnson, I-Connect007This week’s most important news is strategic—and telling. When one puts together the IPC industry reports, we simply have to include the recent conversation with Shawn DuBravac and Tom Kastner. On the design side, check out the latest “On The Line With…” podcast featuring Brad Griffin from Cadence Design Systems, discussing SI and PI in the realm of intelligent system design.
Synopsys, Samsung Electronics Collaborate to Achieve First Production Tapeout of Flagship Mobile CPU
05/03/2024 | PRNewswireSynopsys, Inc. announced that Samsung Electronics has achieved successful production tapeout for its high-performance mobile SoC design, including flagship CPUs and GPUs, with 300MHz higher performance using Synopsys.ai™ full stack AI-driven EDA suite and a broad portfolio of Synopsys IP on Samsung Foundry's latest Gate-All-Around (GAA) process technologies.
Altair Acquires Research in Flight, Forging a New Path for Aerodynamic Analysis
05/03/2024 | AltairAltair a global leader in computational intelligence, announced it has acquired Research in Flight, maker of FlightStream®, which provides computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software with a large footprint in the aerospace and defense sector and a growing presence in marine, energy, turbomachinery, and automotive applications.
Real Time with… IPC APEX EXPO 2024: Software Solutions for Circuit Board Challenges
05/03/2024 | Real Time with...IPC APEX EXPONolan Johnson speaks with Will Webb from Aster Technologies about their software solutions for design teams, manufacturing, test engineers, and process engineers. Aster's software addresses the increasing complexities of circuit boards and the need for alternative testing methods.
Real Time with… IPC APEX EXPO 2024: My Role as a Technology Solutions Director
05/02/2024 | Real Time with...IPC APEX EXPOPeter Tranitz, senior director of technology solutions at IPC, shares insights into his role as the design initiative lead. He details his advocacy work, industry support, and the responsibilities of the design initiative committee. The conversation also covers the revamping of standards, the IPC Design Competition, and the implementation of design rules in software tools.