Tools

CADENCE ALLEGRO AND ORCAD

Having the best-in-class tools to do our job makes our life easier — and yours. Cadence Allegro is the leading PCB design layout tool in the industry and we have been using it for more than 25 years. We use OrCAD schematic capture for our front-end design. Allegro is used for the physical design (aka PCB layout and routing). We maintain all versions of Cadence from 17.4 back to 14.1.

We maintain thousands of in-house correctly generated footprints for any electronics device you can imagine. All of our libraries follow a strict up-front design check so there is no issue when it comes time to assemble the board and find parts don’t fit.

We have a strict constraint-driven flow that ensures we meet power integrity, signal integrity, crosstalk rules, and EMI/EMC. We often see customer designs that do not follow any rules and we can help you through this process of adding constraints so that your designs get through our strict system of first-pass success.

We follow a very rigorous set of internally developed rules to ensure optimal placement, power and ground routing, high-speed signal and return paths, thermal considerations, manufacturing placement rules, and human interface considerations.

All designs are managed by electrical engineers who happen to be passionate and excellent at the physical design process as well as schematic and system design. Everyone speaks the language needed when designing a board. We maintain long-term relationships with our fabricators and material vendors so that our designs are accurate down to the most minute detail. We include detail often missing from our competitors’ designs. Little things like glass-weave type, resin content, Dk & Df as a function of frequency, copper foil type, specific lamination sequence data.

All of us speak transmission line design in detail. Whether it be microstrip, CPW, CPWG, stripline, etc we know it, understand it, and maybe even help you to do the same.

All schematic capture is done in OrCAD with the CIS option. Our CIS database is arranged by our internal company part number and where possible we have second and even third sources on our parts so there’s no last-minute scramble to find a suitable replacement. Our bill of materials provides the customer with a detailed line-by-line spreadsheet with all manufacturer data, part numbers and device characteristics.

SOLIDWORKS WITH ELECTRONICS COOLING ANALYSIS

We fully understand the critical fusion between mechanical and electrical. Just speaking ECAD-MCAD integration is not enough. We actually practice true ECAD-MCAD integration with all of our designs. Clients often provide sufficient models of their desired mechanical features and we incorporate those into our full ECAD-MCAD flow. However see things that can affect the electrical design or mechanical design and provide immediate feedback and solutions.

Simple things first. We check the easy stuff first which we often find is missed. Square corners on PCB designed to have round corners. Components too tall for the space given. Mechanical alignment incorrect. Drill holes in the wrong place.

Since all of our engineers have spent years as designers in electronics labs, they recognize the other things often missed. Cable egress space requirements. Human access points for testing. Tools needed during assembly and service.

Multi-board designs are even trickier. We look at board-to-board electrical interactions that are not necessarily seen during schematic review. How about a switch mode power supply inductor hanging down into your critical analog circuitry? Easy to miss in a paper review. We don’t.

For our high-end customers wishing to have confidence as to whether their electronics will survive the temperature operating environment we offer detailed thermal analysis. We use Solidworks with the Flow for Electronics Cooling high-end CFD solver.

We look at conductive, convective, radiative, joule-heating thermal analyses. We maintain a large database of heatsinks, thermal pads, fans. We can look at many unintended effects such as exhaust air from one device re-entering the inlet causing an unexpected but real heat rise; Solar loading when the product must operate outdoors; Fan sizes and speeds needed to maintain acoustic noise levels but also maintain optimal cooling.

ADditional TOOLS

• LTSPICE

• Sigrity

• Altium