EDA
Altium and Renesas unite for an integrated, open electronics design platform
By Ted Pawela, chief customer officer, Altium T
echnologically speaking, we live in an amazing time when complex electronic innovations in cars, computing, robotics, energy, communications, and pretty much anything surrounding us just keep coming to market. We also live in a time of extraordinary want. As each great new thing reaches the market, our world — businesses, governments, and consumers — always desires more. In fact, it’s one of the few things that really is constant — the expectation for the electronics industry to keep churning out one new thing after another, only quicker, for less money, and even smaller than the last one, while also preparing for a sustainable future. This desire for more, better, best is the drumbeat to which innovation tries to march. Tries, because this is also a time when the path to innovation and efficient production still has too many obstacles to make it easy. As complex electronics increasingly form the heart of a growing number of everyday products, and competitive demands for faster innovation, continual miniaturization, cost control, and other pressures keep rising, demands are bumping into electronic production systems that aren’t up to the task. This is an especially inopportune time for modern electronics creation to be restrained by its very unmodern design and development processes. Even while industry at large is automating and streamlining production elsewhere, current electronics processes are complicated, siloed, iterative, and outdated, with too many steps and stakeholders disconnected from each other.
Electronics design automation (EDA) and printed circuit board (PCB) engineering is one example of a key link in the electronics creation chain that historically has been detached from suppliers, manufacturers, other
28 May 2024
teams in the process, and particularly from semiconductor design and manufacturing, with no clear, standardized way to communicate specs, changes, and other information. Altium believes the industry cannot sustain this situation and still deliver on rising expectations. We envision a far more efficient world, where a fluid, fully connected process across teams, production partners — the entire electronics lifecycle — eliminates errors, performance shortcomings, and other problems the current system consistently produces.
As a global leader in electronics design systems, Altium is in a unique position to build that world of modern electronics development by uniting EDA, semiconductor design, supply chain, manufacturing, and every link in the creation chain as part of an integrated and open electronics system
Components in Electronics
design and lifecycle management platform. By connecting the entire process, we also enable better decision-making as we can shift key decisions left, making them earlier in the process by modeling different scenarios and understanding their consequences before committing to physical hardware. As the connected process also allows collaboration across component, subsystem, and system- level design to be simplified and automated, the impact on the electronics industry’s efficiency, costs, product performance, and pace of innovation will be far-reaching. Let’s focus for the moment on the issues that can arise when EDA engineering is siloed off from semiconductor design and manufacturing. For example, a PCB layout that doesn’t account for the specific needs of its semiconductor devices can lead to signal integrity problems such as crosstalk,
electromagnetic interference (EMI), and signal reflection that can degrade system performance. Disconnected development can also lead to power distribution problems if the power supply design is improper, thermal management issues if heat dissipation design is inadequate, physical layout constraints, manufacturing/assembly issues, higher failure rates, and, of course, the increased costs that accompany every delay and error. Connecting an EDA engineering company and a semiconductor company solves many of these issues while also offering additional advantages. Let’s start with component intelligence. When PCBs and semiconductors are designed in unison, the board can be tailored to the specific needs of the semiconductor components. This creates a more reliable supply chain through more accurate specs and intelligence-based
www.cieonline.co.uk
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64
