Electronic Design - Future PCB design and other hardware design

In the past, the complexity of the PCB board was not as high as it is now. The PCB design of a product (such as a mobile phone) may only need one engineer to complete, and because of the characteristics of the PCB design work, it can only be completed by a single engineer-- At least at the same time, only one engineer can do PCB design work.

Nowadays, it is almost impossible for a single engineer to complete the PCB design work. One is because the workload is too large and it is difficult to complete it by one person, and the other is because of the urgent market demand for new products, the products must be completed in the shortest possible time. Design and test verification work and bring it to the market. Therefore, in the PCB design stage, this situation often occurs: multiple engineers work in shifts, people stop but the design work does not stop.

At present, the biggest challenge for PCB design work is: With the continuous improvement of product functions and performance, the wiring scale of PCB boards is getting larger and more complicated, and there are more and more factors to be considered. Working efficiency in PCB design has become the biggest key challenge.

Mentor Graphics PCB Beijing event held recently. The event discussed the importance of PCB design in the product development process, high-speed design solutions, and Mentor Graphics' collaborative PCB design solutions.

In order to shorten the time for product development and testing and verification, and thus bring products to the market faster, engineers urgently need a method that can greatly improve design efficiency. In this Mentor Graphics event, Mentor Graphics' collaborative design system impressed the author.

Through the multi-user parallel design system of Mentor Graphics, multiple engineers (up to 15 engineers working at the same time) can work together at the same time, which can greatly improve design efficiency, save a lot of research and development time, and minimize TTM (Time To Market) cycle. According to Mentor Graphics, the use of a multi-user parallel design system can shorten the design cycle that used to take months to several weeks.

The basic principle of Mentor Graphics' multi-user parallel design system is that one of the workstations in the network is used as the server host to coordinate and distribute the tasks of several other workstations. Multiple engineers can work on each workstation at the same time. In the past, the method for multiple engineers to carry out PCB design at the same time was to divide the entire PCB layout into blocks, but this cannot be regarded as a true collaborative design, because it is very restrictive. When it comes to cross-block wiring, the relevant The engineers of the block all stopped to further complete the design. Mentor Graphics uses the coordinated distribution of the server host to ensure that the work of each engineer does not conflict with each other and ensures the safety and reliability of the design work.

Not only PCB design, but in other hardware design fields, in order to cope with the ever-increasing PCB copy board hardware design work, collaborative design is bound to be the main development direction in the future.