PCB Matters
PCB Matters RSSAdvanced tools mitigates risks with Embedded Passives (EP’s)
New technology is cool but… with most new processes there are risks to be managed.
Usually new technologies promises/offers higher design performance, lower product costs and or faster design turn around but, failing to manage the risks can cause all the benefits to go down the drain. Embedded Passives are no exception –on the contrary, there are many pitfalls that can result in bad boards –expensive such, being delivered back to you from the board shop.
Now, risks are always part of life. –You can walk far to avoid them but that’s rarely the most efficient path.
Walt Disney once said:
“I dream, I test my dreams against my beliefs, I dare to take risks, and I execute my vision to make those dreams come true.”
Complete focus on the vision/goal and daring to take the risks that must be taken brought Mickey to the world. –Surely that must work in EDA too?
How do you prevent costly design disasters? You can design with EP’s on any layout tool. –just put the appropriate shapes on user layers – but I wouldn’t exactly call that “mitigating the risks.” Still, many are designing with EP’s this way.
In Expedition PCB, you have a series of capabilities that guide you through the entire process from material and process planning to establishing if a design is suitable for embedding and which parts are best embedded and even generating the parametric components and place them on the PCB inner layers –all in a correct by design environment.
The image shows the EP planner tool that gives you a graphic representation of component values, number of components and suitable EP materials to help you establish which materials would cover which components and also calculate –before you even start the layout, the total size of these parts and their power rating.
Its not possible by just looking at a design to figure out if it is a suitable EP candidate or which parts to embed or even which materials that will yield a successful embedding. This little tool let you tradeoff between all these parameters. On top of this we have all the analysis tools for SI and PI to help you keep your designs within specs.
It’s all about enabling you to make use of new technologies that help you maintain -or gain, a competitive edge –and at the same time mitigate the risks involved. -There are always risks but properly managed you can walk the straight path.
More on Embedded Passives: Read my article in PCB Magazine: http://www.iconnect007.com/emag/pub/PCB-Nov2011/?page=66
Tags: "Embedded Passives", embedded, Expedition Enterprise, Expedition PCB, intgegral resistors
Shortening Design Cycles With Concurrent Engineering
In this series of blogs, I’m going to focus on concurrent engineering and cover the following topics:
· What is concurrent engineering & why does it matter?
· Concurrent engineering in practice
· Collaborative concurrent engineering
So, let’s get started with the first question: what is it and why does it matter? Concurrent engineering involves the introduction of parallelism into the engineering process with the purpose of shortening the elapsed time to complete that process.
The parallelism could be applied to steps of the process or it could be applied to a step within the process. A simple example – I’m thinking of getting a set of snow tires for my car which will mean changing all of the wheels. If I do it myself, I will have to get the jack out, and in a serial process, raise each corner of the car, take off the wheel, put on the new wheel, lower the car and remove the jack. I’ll do this four times and I don’t know about you, but it would probably take me an hour. How could I accelerate this process?
I could press-gang my 2 teenage sons and unlucky wife and assuming I had four axle stands and four wrenches, I would still serially jack up each corner and insert the axle stand, but now the four of us could replace the wheels in parallel, then serially remove the axle stands. Here we are applying parallelism to the 4 individual steps of changing the wheels. With this approach, I reckon I could get the elapsed time down to 30 minutes. Notice, I didn’t get the time down to 15 minutes even while applying 4 people to the problem – the reason being that there is still some serial work going on here.
How could I get close to my 15 minute nirvana? By introducing some new technology – something that will jack up the car faster or that will jack up the whole car at once. In this way, we are able to leverage technology so that jacking the car is considered one step (effectively performing those 4 individual jacking steps in parallel). Some folks already figured this out – just take a look at this pit stop during a formula 1 race. 60 minutes down to 7 seconds – not bad!
I’ll delve into how concurrent engineering can be applied to PCB design in my next blog, and how technology can enable parallelism in ways that otherwise aren’t possible.
We have all experienced projects that were behind schedule. Perhaps you work in an industry where earlier to market means increased revenue and market share. Concurrent engineering provides “shortening of elapsed time” for the design process and this answers the second part of our question. In real life, the quicker we can complete a design the more competitive we will be.
I’ll also acknowledge that concurrent engineering does not necessarily mean fewer resources applied to the project. It does however support the efficient use of those resources. Here’s an actual example of this idea in action…
Fujitsu Technology Solutions makes computers and servers, so you can see why time to market would be so critical. In order to meet their schedules and time to market goals, Fujitsu was running night shifts so that designs could be worked on with a longer working day. Of course, there’s some inefficiency in the hand off of a design from one engineer to another, and there is the additional expense of paying night shift rates. Through the use of concurrent engineering, Fujitsu was able to eliminate the expensive night shifts and to apply those engineering resources during the normal day shift.
Why didn’t Fujitsu make this change sooner? Well, I’ll explain that in a later blog but suffice to say for now that concurrent engineering is not just about methodology but also about enabling design technology.
Tags: Design Creation, Expedition Enterprise, Layout & Routing, PCB
Assess Your PCB Development Performance
In one of my first blog posts I wrote about PCB Designers being the “unsung heroes of innovation.” After spending a week in Israel and visiting PCB Fabricators and Assemblers, I am even more convinced of the complexity of the PCB Development process. The cycle of complexity is accelerating – we see this amongst our customers in our annual Technology Leadership Awards and we see this day in and day out in terms of the projects we are engaged in.
In my most recent post I talked about WHY PCB MATTERS – and referred to a study from Aberdeen regarding research they conducted. This research supports our assumption that PCB is a highly essential part of the overall product development process. One of the key research points from that study is that PCB’s make up to 31% of the overall costs of a product.
My observations from my visits this week make it easy to see why. Not only are technologies becoming more complex but also processes are increasing in complexity. Yet there is still lots of islands of activity that are not integrated. Mentor is trying to address both the technology complexity as well as the process complexity in multiple ways – such as through product development and through acquisitions, like we recently completed with Valor.
Getting back to the study, we figured our efforts should not stop there. We wanted to give the wider PCB community a chance to assess your practices against the wider samples/benchmarks from the Aberdeen study. So we partnered with Aberdeen in establishing a on-line assessment tool to give you a core understanding of how your organizations stack up against the wider use-case samples. This assessment is not about Mentor solutions or about specific technologies, it’s about overall PCB development practices.
Take a look at our landing page – there we have a webinar by Michelle Boucher, a consultant from Aberdeen offering an overview of the study. You can also download the study itself. Lastly, you can take the online assessment and leverage the findings for your own organization as a point of discussion for possible areas of improvement.
The major intent of these efforts is mostly to raise the level of conversation around PCB. I think we too often get lost in the technology discussions and not enough in terms of extracting the business value of what we are doing.
Tags: Aberdeen, Design Collaboration, Design for Manufacture, Signal Integrity
PCB Design Does Matter! The Study
I called this blog area “PCB Matters” for a reason.
PCBs are like the Rodney Dangerfield’s of product development – they don’t get the respect they deserve. I think this is because there really is not a such thing as a singular PCB design task – but really a series of tasks with specialists where each speaks a unique language that’s hard to crossover. So what happens is that each specialist (RF designer, High Speed Engineer, Layout Designer, Process Engineering, etc.) all kind of stay in their own domains. So, it’s no surprise that PCBs do not get the kind of respect they deserve. It’s hard to decrypt what is happening at the PCB development level if you don’t come from the PCB world.
It’s a paradox. Because PCB’s are the bridge between the mechanical and electrical world. Fine-tuning the PCB development process can have a significant impact on a company’s bottom line. In an Aberdeen Study, PCBs are found to make up to 31% of the overall cost of a product. This presents significant opportunities for optimizing the product development process.
Proof that we don’t “speak the same language” is in this study. On page 11 of this study a question was asked and the answers were delineated by whether a manager or staff was answering. So, for example 84% of managers answered that “design for cost” is a key initiative whereas 64% of staff answered cost as being a core driver. On the other hand, 89% of staff identified “design for signal integrity” as being critical with 77% of management concurring.
So, although technology is critical (and Mentor has been investing accordingly – most recently with finalizing the acquisition of Valor), it is also a management issue. Putting the right tools in place is part of this challenge, driving the usage of those tools for success in enabling key business goals is the other part.
So, PCB development does matter and it should.
Stay tuned – we will walk through more on this topic over the coming weeks.
Tags: Aberdeen, Executive Study, Valor
Collaboration Interuppted
My colleague, David Wiens, recently posted a blog about survey results that we collected regarding PCB design. One of the questions asked was around the most common platforms for collaboration. Eighty percent (80%) of the respondents claimed that email was their common platform for communication followed by conferencing as the next most commonly used vehicle for collaboration.
This got me thinking, our most common platforms for collaboration that we are using have been around for forty (40) years (for email) and 133 years for conferencing (telephone). If collaboration is so critical in business success, why are our collaboration platforms of choice the ones that are least efficient? (In a Google Wave video there is a claim that email was invented the same year of the lava lamp, the last time I had a lava lamp was in my college dorm room twenty years ago – it went with my velvet posters and black light).
In the next question of the survey we asked about barriers to effective collaboration. The first response was that “ambiguous communications” was the major barrier to effective collaboration. This is a “no-duh” moment; the reason why there is so much ambiguity is because we are using highly inefficient means to collaborate!
There has to be (and there is) a better way. Over the past month and through December we are highlighting a series of webinars around PCB Layout and Routing. Our most recent webinar was around enabling concurrent team collaboration in layout and routing.
In today’s hyper-competitive and global business environment it no longer makes sense to have “push-pull” collaboration. This is mostly the paradigm of email and conferencing. We need to drive more concurrency throughout our processes. We need to enable “native” collaboration where engineers and designers can collaborate within the context of their own environments or where ECAD and MCAD teams can do the same. We need to be able to have real bridges between design and manufacturing and to be able to understand the implication and constraints of each others’ processes.
All of this is possible today – it just means getting rid of the lava lamp!
Tags: collaboration, email, layout and routing, PCB collaboration, telephone
PCB Does Matter
Over the course of the coming months I will blog from time to time on the importance of PCB in product development.
There is an odd paradox in electronics development, and in PCB in particular. PCB development is a highly specialized field, both in terms of engineering and design knowledge, and unless you are on the “inside” you might not appreciate the effort it takes in getting a board out the door.
I believe that PCB engineers and designers do not always get the organizational recognition that they deserve. I think this might be because the language of PCB development is very much an “insiders” language. To the untrained eye, the PCB is a green board with nets, traces, and components. It’s not a sleek geometrical design. Therefore, in many product organizations, PCB itself is almost a functional “part number” in an overall product bill of materials.
So, over the course of the coming months I will spend time in writing about the relevance of PCB in product development and overall organizational innovation. Just by judging the expertise in terms of PhD’s and specialization, PCB development success is highly critical to overall product development success and can play a part in project profitability.
You may have noticed that we have spent time with our customers in capturing their challenges, paths to solution, and success on video. You can check these out on mentor.com under our multimedia section. Obviously we want to use these testimonials to advocate for Mentor’s solutions for PCB development. But I think there is a more important story here. It’s a story about complexity, discovery, and path to solution.
One of the more recent videos tells the story of Fujitsu from multiple organizational angles. From the user/designer level, its about functionality and from management its about key business drivers like time to market, compliance, and product differentiation. The big message that I think is derived from the Fujitsu video is that it’s not just the applications, but possibly more important, it’s the integration and the ability to manage data within a singular environment that drives project success.
So – stay tuned to this blog column. Over the course of the coming months I will examine the paradox more and more and why PCB is very much at the root of product enablement and needs to have more organizational visibility than it currently receives today.
Tags: Customer testimonials, Fujitsu, PCB Development, PCB Innovation
The Radical Future of R&D
The cover story in BusinessWeek’s September 7th edition was titled “The Radical Future of R&D”. One of the articles in this edition was about science and job creation, “How Science Can Create Millions of New Jobs”.
The premise of this article is that the overall innovation pipeline is faltering. This is mostly due to corporate under-investment and short term needs for capital gains on R&D activities. In short, companies have moved costly or volume production to low cost areas and for the past two decades there has not been anything to really fill the void. So, the assumption of this article is that a renewed, intense investment in science needs to happen for major job creation to happen to cope with current unemployment, projected population growth, and urbanization.
If you think about it (although conventional logic would say different ) when was the last BIG thing? The last big driver that caused a shift in the economy was the spread of the internet in the mid-90s. There was another article a few months back, also in BusinessWeek, called “Innovation, Interrupted” that examines the actual lack of innovation over the past decade.
The article talks about accelerating innovation and the author’s own recommendations for venture capitalists, government, industry, and academic roles in these efforts. The idea of accelerating innovation is compelling.
You can argue that a w0rld where you have to report on return on investment at quarterly intervals may limit risk and innovation. Conversely, you can argue that in order to innovate profitably, you need to quickly identify that single, viable idea, and accelerate its introduction to market. On an earlier blog I suggested that the “Edison model” of innovation may not be the ideal anymore – we can’t fail a thousand times before we succeed, we need to decide quickly on the ONE idea and bring it to market as quickly as possible.
In terms of PCB development, we can measure success both by bottom line (cost, time) and top line. Top line represents opportunity. If we can enable accelerated time-to-market, not only are we enabling better premiums in the marketplace but we are also enabling more time to innovate for current and future projects.
I invite all of you to visit the re-designed multimedia section on mentor.com for PCB. There you will see customer testimonials, on-line demos, and on-demand webinars. We fully believe that we are enablers of a radical (and better) future of R&D and product development.
Tags: Innovation, multimedia, PCB devellopment
The verdict is (almost) in!
In my first blog post I raised the issue that PCB developers are the “unsung heroes of innovation.” The premise was that virtually all design awards go to the mechanical or industrial world. However – it’s the innards of a product that really provide differentiation. In the blog post I talked about the smart phone wars and a Time article that presented the view that it was the hard-drive in the iPOD that really differentiated it from other players at the time. The blog post was encouraging Mentor’s users of its PCB solutions to submit designs to our annual Technology Leadership Awards (TLA).
It’s been a month now since we completed the submission process. During the month of August, the panel of independent judges have been reviewing submissions and we will be announcing winners next week, Thursday Septemenber 10 at 12 noon EST, via a worldwide webcast.
The submissions this year exceeded past years’ submission in terms of increasing complexity as well as the general trend of globalization. There was not one dominant country or continent – this is truly a global event.
Some of the complexity in the designs we reviewed included:
- Most use of FPGAs – 48
- Most layers – 32
- Nearly 50% incorporated HDI
- 63% incorporated Power Integrity in their design
- Largest total trace distance was 1,247,189″ (or 19.6miles)
This is just a taste. As in past years we have captured some of the TLA winners on video describing their challenges and paths to resolution. You can see some of these videos in our multimedia section. We intend to do the same this year so that increasing awareness gets out about the complexities that you have to cope with day after day and the need to adopt technologies and methodolies in achieving your core project goals.
So please attend the webcast that announces the winners and learn more about the kind of complexities your peers around the world are coping with. If you did not submit this past year, please do so next year. We highly value all of your contributions to both our innovations as well as to the general industry.
About PCB Matters
Thoughts on PCB from a group of Mentor-ites
Latest Posts
- OK, so no EP boom but there appear to have been a small puff…
- Advanced tools mitigates risks with Embedded Passives (EP’s)
- Embedded passives never boomed –but saves high performance designs
- Shortening Design Cycles With Concurrent Engineering
- Assess Your PCB Development Performance
- PCB Design Does Matter! The Study