PCB Technical - Mentor's Rhines predicts PCB restructuring

San Jose, California? According to Mentor Graphics CEO Wally Rhines, the circuit board tools division of the EDA industry is today seen as a mature, integrated and somewhat stagnant market, but it will soon become active. In the keynote speech of the PCB Design Conference West held on Tuesday (March 16), it was predicted that as faster PCB design breaks the existing tools, users will need to reorganize.

"The complexity of integrated circuit design has spread to the circuit board, and you are reaching the limit you can do at the chip level, so why not share the pain and make the circuit board design more complicated? This is what is happening, but it is not linear It happened exponentially. It said that although most people are aware of the challenge of IC design tools, they are not aware of the challenge of "pressure" to PCB design.

"EDA companies continue to add new features for PCB tools to overcome stress, but the tools we provide are largely designed a long time ago. I have an argument that printed circuit design will undergo some very fundamental experience in integrated circuit design. reason.

PCB manufacturing, FPGA, signal integrity, library and data management, and globalization are the five major “pressures” that will promote the not-too-distant reorganization of PCB design.

PCB manufacturing is introducing new levels of complexity that some tools simply cannot handle. The use of microvias, high-density interconnects and embedded passive components have become more and more common. He said that as designs become more complex and the use of these technologies increases, placement and routing techniques may also be disrupted.

"Just being able to route on the pin density, get out of a package with a high level of pin density, or reduce the wire spacing by five times compared to the time it started in the past ten years, will be a huge benefit, he pointed out Compared with the method that only uses laminate, users who use high-density interconnect (HDI) and microvia technology can save a lot of layers and densities. With the development of new silicon processes, they will introduce more and more Source devices. He said that reducing passive components in the design while maintaining the shrinking form factor space requirements may require PCB synthesis techniques.

As PCB designs become more complex and FPGAs become more popular, FPGA PCB design teams must work more closely to determine the trade-offs between PCB and FPGA. Although this is not an imminent issue, technologies that facilitate communication between the two groups are needed to accelerate design and help team collaboration.

In addition, signal integrity will continue to remain unchanged. Chip and system speeds continue to increase, and circuit boards become denser. 3GIO and asynchronous designs are examples of areas that will destroy the rule of thumb for signal integrity and require "statistical analysis."

Related topics of library data management and globalization also herald the breaking of current PCB design methods. With the development of new technologies and tools, libraries will also change, and companies need to be able to adapt to these changes.

"At some point, the existing [library] format will be broken and moved because they must have a new generation, they must be able to automate the part selection process and integrate the EDA supplier library with the company's overall solution.

As more designs are created by teams from different regions of the world, these teams must use common libraries and data management software. PCB companies can create software that allows design teams in different fields to design PCBs at the same time.