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toolsZONE Products for the week of June 9, 2008
Altium Says…
At Last! Electronics Designers And Mechanical Designers Can Now Collaborate In Real Time
Altium solves 25 years of electronics design pain: designers in both worlds can now link and review designs dynamically
Altium, the leading developer of unified electronics design solutions, has introduced technology that, for the first time, lets electronic designers fit their boards into enclosures in real time, in 3D, without guesswork. They can eliminate the numerous costly, trial-and-error, "wait-and-see" ECAD-MCAD iterations that, until now, have delayed bringing a product to market.
Electronics designers continue to seek new ways to innovate, to create the next generation of electronic products. Altium believes that a unified approach to electronics design, which now links to the MCAD world, must replace the current silo approach of loosely-connected design tools that go to making an electronic product and bringing it to market.
Being able to manipulate the enclosure and make design decisions in real time, during the electronics design process, is a crucial step forward in unifying broader product design processes with electronics design. It’s now easy for electronics designers to collaborate directly with their mechanical design peers.
Building on Altium's earlier, ground-breaking real-time 3D PCB visualization technology, it's now possible to link to external STEP models from within Altium Designer to bring, for example, the model of the casing into the PCB design environment. By using the nonproprietary STEP 3D file format as a mechanism, Altium allows ECAD-MCAD collaboration without forcing organizations to purchase costly integration add-ons or use a specific mechanical CAD package.
Altium Designer lets designers create the board shape directly from the case model, do full mechanical fit and clearance checking, and update their board design or component choice and placement to ensure a perfect fit and conformance to physical design constraints. If the mechanical designer changes the case design, this is updated within Altium Designer. The complete board design can also be output by Altium Designer as a STEP model for use by the mechanical designer.
Electronics designers can interactively adjust board layout, component placement and even component package choice to suit the proposed enclosure design. They can ensure that the PCB complies with mechanical clearance constraints – tested directly against the real enclosure design – before the board is sent for prototyping or manufacture.
This technology will significantly reduce the number of time-consuming, error-prone and costly design iterations currently necessary to close the ECAD-MCAD loop, and will, for the first time, allow real collaboration between these increasingly interdependent areas of design.
Nick Martin, CEO of Altium, said, "Electronics design companies are looking for new ways to innovate and sustain differentiation, and companies are recognizing the benefits of a unified design solution. Until now, bringing the electronics and case design together successfully has been pretty much down to guesswork and luck. That’s not a sustainable situation as we move into a new generation of electronic product development.
"Simply incrementally improving on design processes that have gone before is not enough. We really do need to change how design is done at a fundamental level. The new ECADMCAD collaboration capabilities of Altium Designer demonstrate what’s possible when you think beyond traditional design silos and take a unified approach to product development."
New Unified Electronics Design Features That Remove Design Barriers And Pain
The latest version of Altium’s unified electronics design solution delivers features that cover all areas of electronics design.
At the board level, PCB-level pin swapping, auto-optimization, BGA fan out, and system-wide differential pair support make using FPGAs on a board so much easier and effective, even for those who aren’t PCB design experts.
A new routing engine not only makes board design faster and easier for specialist PCB designers; when combined with the general editing environment and real-time 3D PCB visualization capabilities, it also lets those less experienced in board design turn out workable boards faster and easier.
C programmers, as well as creating application code within Altium Designer, can now create hardware directly using their existing C coding skills and link this hardware into the wider FPGA-based system. Indeed, the entire programmable design process can be done by software or board-level designers without any specific FPGA design expertise.
Ready-to-use FPGA components borrow from board design methodologies to enable functionality to be moved off the board and into the programmable domain. C-to-hardware compilation lets programmers use this FPGA hardware to accelerate application execution and define the platform on which their code runs.
EN-Genius Says…
This product, from the Land of Oz, approaches design at almost every level of product description and characterization. It’s well nigh impossible for me to thoroughly test drive something of this magnitude, but here are my impressions and observations. Not incidentally, in recent engineering polls, Altium was voted the most popular provider of printed circuit board (PCB) layout tools, winning out over big-gun competitors such as Cadence, Mentor, and Zuken, and the company has a laudable track record, extending back to its Protel days in 1985.
 The use of standard file formats, and the ability to work in an EDA methodology that provides a single product definition (so you can meld mechanical CAD with a PCB editor, for example) is undoubtedly far-reaching. Today’s complex embedded designers, melding hardware and software that’s tightly coupled and all in one box – however physically small -- need this kind of development environment.
The days of sequential iterations while prototyping a system are out the window. And, as system functions get programmable, largely due to the impact of the ubiquitous FPGA, processes become increasingly dependent on each other. It would be ideal if you could smoothly couple PCB design, FPGA design, and embedded software coding. As these elements converge, EDA tools will converge, and that's what Altium Designer purports to do. Moreover, Altium Designer is scalable: it can be deployed if you're working independently, or working as part of a design team or large enterprise.
Stitching It All Together
If you're involved with packaging, you need to look at the components in your system to see how they're wired together, right? That’s normally done at the schematic level. Obviously, some means of connecting devices is required, and that's what drives layout and routing tools for PCBs. Typically, the resulting PCB design is then used to generate files needed to fabricate and assemble boards at some point, as well as providing some documentation and (hopefully) linking to the mechanical design of the product's packaging and enclosure.
A limitation is that the pins on an FPGA are typically assigned and re-assigned as an FPGA definition and function evolves. Yes, you can set pin assignments in stone to ease board routing, but that imposes restrictions on restructuring an FPGA functions and I/Os. If you do go ahead and manually make I/O changes, what happens between your FPGA design and PCB design? How do you maintain sync between these devices and the layout of the boards they will reside on? On another plane, how do you coordinate the design of a malleable software platform and the writing of the embedded software?
You need tools that can support the movement of peripherals and processors in the programmable domain. Ideally you’d like a hardware-software co-design environment that links FPGA design, software development, and mechanical layout. That's where Altium Designer comes in.
Altium Designer promises to let you craft a PCB, while at the same time integrating any number of programmable devices into that physical design. What's more, it will let you manage components and libraries as you move your design from the lab into manufacturing, all under a single unified EDA development environment.
 This software also helps partition a design. Its schematic editor, for example, lets you capture designs – of virtually any complexity – hierarchically. This lets you take both a top-down and bottom-up view of your circuit as you break the design into functional blocks. And, there’s no limit to the number of sheets that can be contained within a project, nor is the depth of a hierarchy.
FPGA Neutrality
Especially interesting is the fact that Altium wares are FPGA vendor-neutral. If that's really true, you’ll be able to freely choose whatever FPGA best suits your application. Thanks to this tool, you’ll also be able to partition your circuitry between different types of FPGAs. The system also provides schematic-based components that give direct access to vendor-specific so-called soft processors, such as Xilinx MicroBlaze.
Altium Designer also permits a design to be created without compelling you to choose a specific processor. Designs can be re-targeted to a range of different platforms during development, without re-work of either software or hardware, enabling the final choice of processor to be made after the functional design of your application.
In step with that flexibility, Altium Designer also lets you synchronize schematic capture with PCB layout, and maintain I/O sync between FPGA designs and the boards they reside on. Indeed, Altium Designer's unified environment supports full and automatic synchronization of an entire board project, letting you manage the flow of any changes between PCB design and source schematics.
Bi-Directional Sync
Synchronization is also bi-directional, so you can manage changes made at both schematic and PCB levels. The software gives you control over the direction in which the changes are propagated, and you can document these changes by generating ECOs (engineering change orders) during synchronization.
If it works as advertised, this process automagically ensures consistency of memory and peripheral definitions between hardware and software. You can make design changes at any point in the process and in any document within a project, with Altium Designer making sure your changes are reflected in every relevant design document.
Regardless of where the design focus happens to be at any point, physical constraints, such as track clearances, path lengths, or trace widths, can be monitored. As such, Altium Designer rules-driven layout and editing environment gives you control over every aspect of the physical implementation of a circuit, essentially eliminating nasty surprises.
Centralized Design Rules
Set-up and management of design rules is also centralized. However, you're not locked in. An engineer’s judgment isn’t precluded. The software lets you selectively enable or disable individual rules as you see fit. Rules can also be defined during design capture and then automatically propagated through to board layout.
Defined rules sets can also be exported or imported, permitting you to propagate rule definitions between projects. In all cases, the Altium Designer software will monitor your design rules (such as track width and clearances) as you route, preventing violations.
Altium Designer uses a straightforward query system to define the objects that a rule is applied to, which gives you control over rule targeting. Moreover, you can define multiple rules of the same type targeted to different sets of objects, providing hierarchical constraint definition. You could set up rules to route a net at one width on a board top layer, for example, and choose a different width on the bottom layer, or close the solder mask over the vias on the bottom layer, but not the top layer.
Compilation Checking
At any time during the design process you can compile your project. At each compilation the hierarchy and connectivity of the project is rebuilt and verified, and the project is checked for electrical and drafting errors.
The project is also automatically compiled before any especially critical actions, such as invoking interactive project navigation or syncing schematics with PCB layout. In this way, the Altium toolset ensures you’re alerted to errors and potential design problems as you go along. As it runs, Altium Designer interactively highlights common problems, such as duplicate component designators, directly on the schematic as you work. This lets you spot and correct errors as they occur, essentially without interruption to workflow.
The interface also lets you interactively browse your way through components, nets, and violations, within schematic and PCB docs. You can also drill down through the hierarchy to highlight individual primitives associated with objects. As you browse, graphical displays dynamically zoom to selected objects, dimming surrounding objects so you can focus on just the pieces of the design you're interested in.
Interactive Data Mining
A feature Altium calls Board Insight also lets your cursor act as an interactive data mining tool. As you hover the cursor within the PCB designer, essential information is displayed in Board Insight about the underlying objects. When multiple objects are stacked, Board Insight presents you with a graphical list that lets you select or edit the properties of any object under the cursor. You can also sort and filter objects using graphical and list views.
With respect to today's fast logic and high-speed serial transmission schemes, you can also perform signal integrity analysis at the capture stage, as well as during board layout. This powerful feature lets you identify potential problem areas, and helps determine proper transmission line terminations. This should be especially helpful with FPGAs, as the wide range of I/O characteristics on different devices can complicate the process of correctly terminating signal lines.
Mixed-signal technologies can also be accommodated. Mixed-signal circuit simulation is a unified part of the capture process, and it’s integrated with schematic editing. The Altium Designer simulation engine supports both standard SPICE and PSPICE models. You get the ability to do on-the-fly temperature and parameter sweeping, Monte Carlo component tolerance sweeps, pole-zero analysis, and noise analysis.
Simulation results are displayed in a waveform viewer. You can also perform mathematical post-processing of simulation results, and overlay waveforms. You can also display different simulation types on a single graph, and then export the waveforms.
JTAG and Test
Altium Designer also lets you dynamically investigate the status of any FPGA pins using JTAG boundary scan. That's just the ticket for devices packaged with inaccessible pins, such as ball-grid arrays. If the Altium Designer is connected to a development board, such as the company's device-independent NanoBoard, or your JTAG-equipped prototype or production board, a built-in realtime JTAG viewer lets you view the state of all the pins on any JTAG-supported component.
In use, the JTAG viewer presents a footprint and symbol view of the target device. You can then manually capture a snapshot of the pin status of the device, or have the display update dynamically as the circuit virtually operates. You can also hide display of any unused pins, and select any single or group of nets within your design to focus on. This allows you to monitor the status of just the pins you're interested in.
Pin status can also be dynamically reflected and displayed on source schematics. Again, this kind of lockstep well-integrated feature lets you trace signals throughout an entire design flow. Imagine actually monitoring the status of critical lines in realtime as you exercise the circuit to determine correct state changes. Nifty, eh?
You also get a suite of FPGA-based virtual instruments (VIs) that can be used like bench-level test gear. Like the simulators, you can use these VIs to probe and stimulate interconnections within a running system. The VIs are incorporated at the schematic level and are connected to the appropriate nets within the design.
Mechanical Design
At the outset of this review I mentioned that Altium Designer gives you the ability to transfer data to and from mechanical CAD tools. This is crucial to ensuring components such as sockets, switches, display modules, and keypads mate with enclosures, cases, and other mechanical interfaces, such as standoffs and cutouts. The software includes extensive support for a wide range of mechanical CAD tools.
Letting you place components directly from a database library, the software also supports access from any ODBC-compliant source, such as a Microsoft Access database, an Excel spreadsheet, and most engineering management systems. You can also connect directly to OrCAD CIS databases. This ability should go a long way to integrate Altium Designer with your company’s existing procurement and inventory system software packages.
You can also import or export both .DXF and native AutoCAD .DWG files directly from the system schematic or PCB editor. Altium Designer also includes bi-directional support for reading and writing in IDF (Intermediate Data Format), letting you readily bring in board shape definitions, and transfer out the assembled PCB. IDF is a neutral format for exchanging PCB assembly information between PCB layout tools such as from Altium and Mechanical CAD systems such as SolidWorks.
Both VRML (virtual reality modeling language) and IGES (initial graphics exchange specification) formats are supported in the 3D mechanical CAD domain, too. Altium Designer lets you include 3-D information, such as component body shapes for automatic extrusion, or full VRML or IGES models. You can also use a PCB 3-D viewer to render an accurate 3-D model of your board, and export the complete assembly as an IGES file.
Finally, updates and enhancements are free. Every license grants access to new service packs and device support. An Altium Library Development Center also continuously develops new and updated libraries under an ISO 9000-certified quality assurance program. These libraries are available as freebies to Altium Designer users.
Obviously there’s a whole lot more to Altium methodology and tools. There’s more than can be expounded upon here. So, for more details contact Altium Ltd, Level 3, 12a Rodborough Road, French’s Forest, NSW 2086 Australia. Phone: +61 2 8986 4400. Fax: +61 2 8986 4440, or view a neat video presentation.
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