Your Electronics Open Source

By John Isaac, Mentor Graphics [ Courtesy of Assipe ]
In today’s competitive electronics industry, getting to market ahead of the competition can mean the difference between a successful product and one that misses its market window. Design cycle time plays a big part in determining a product launch schedule and the PCB layout portion of this process often is called upon to make up for early design phase schedule slips. One designer and one computer at a time can be a limiting factor.
Traditionally, designers are pulled in from other projects to assist with meeting deadlines, usually by adopting shift-work routines or physically splitting the design into multiple pieces. Both methods incur significant overhead costs that tend to negate the advantage of design collaboration. Partitioning the design into pieces and having designers work separately on each piece can help improve the situation. But putting that design database back together is a tedious and error-prone task.
PCB Design Solutions
There are technologies available that can change the way PCBs are designed. One solution enables PCB designers and multiple computer processors to work on a single design database simultaneously. This parallel-design technology requires a design session manager (server) and multiple design clients in a LAN- or WAN-networked environment (Figure 1). The primary activity of the server is to receive updated requests from each client, check the request to ensure that no design rule violations are made, and then synchronize each client and a common database with updates. Each client has its own dedicated processor and memory and views the entire design. They also can witness the edits from other clients as the server processes them. The design database can be stored anywhere on the network.

This parallel-design-solution architecture does not require designers to partition the design in any manner. This makes it a true real-time collaboration environment, eliminating problems associated with partition boundaries while reducing the total time to complete the design. Users claim that it enables them to cut design cycle times by 40-70%, depending on the number of designers and the nature of the board. Location means little because designers can be in the same office or dispersed globally.
To begin a design session, the board design is loaded onto the server by any member of the design team. As clients join the session, they provide a name to identify themselves to the other users. In addition, the current state of the layout design is downloaded automatically onto the client’s local desktop computer. By working on the design locally, designers can use the processing power and memory of their own workstation, yet still view the entire design and witness edits from other clients as the server processes them in real time. Clients also can join or leave the session at any time.
A Video Game for Designers
Multiple Auto-routers
Conclusion