Altium Designer 15.1 includes features to improve design efficiency with expansions to productivity, documentation, and high-speed design. High-speed design configurations for length matching rules can now be configured in an easy-to-use wizard that automatically accounts for T-branches, components, signal pairs, and groups, greatly reducing the time spent on setup for high-speed designs. Exports PCB designs as 3D PDFs, allowing viewing and rotating with a compatible PDF viewer. Navigates boards with individual component selection, providing greater accuracy and design intent to fabricators. Surface layers for rigid-flex designs can now be added with “bikini” coverlays that are fully visible in 3D and can be configured with specific material needs. Coverlay edge clearance and expansion rules have also been added to the design rule options, providing users with precise control over coverlay applications. Pad and vias can be easily be managed in a pad and via library, allowing users to define custom templates for pad shape and size. Templates can then be applied to specific groups of pads on a PCB for easy application, saving countless hours defining pad options individually. New Unions panel helps to better organize design data and align Union data with other PCB objects in a design. The Union panel will show a hierarchical view of Union types, Unions, and Union primitives for easy reference.
Kozio VTOS Scan tool automates the process of creating new configurations, enabling verification of new board designs, new product introductions, and full volume manufacturing test. Built using VTOS embedded software for hardware verification, is said to accelerate the process of configuring new embedded tests, while providing previously tested built-in verification commands. Uses minimal system-on-chip (SoC) resources to provide a stable on-device application for hardware configuring, hardware interface testing, and controlling all bus-based devices, without compiling code and embedded device restarts. Pin mux configuration, driving signals, interfacing with bus devices, and hardware interface testing is performed at run time without compilation and system restarts. Is said to be easy to install. UI makes it easy to configure board-specific settings, automatically scan for bus devices and add them to the test configuration, and add test commands for board-specific use cases.
Multisim 14 SPICE simulation environment features an enhanced user experience, quicker access to simulation results, and improved interactive simulation. Includes active analysis functionality and graphing and post-processing results. Seamlessly integrates with LabVIEW software. Faster simulation and results with new probes and active analysis. New components for power electronics teaching and design. Conducts digital electronics teaching with Digilent FPGA boards. Features MPLAB co-simulation with 4,000 microcontrollers from Microchip (beta). High-level design accuracy with over 36,000 components from leading suppliers. Education Edition acts as circuit teaching tool for analog, digital and power circuits.
OrCAD PCB CAD software now includes five new products and three key features aimed at increasing productivity by reducing design cycle time and facilitating more advance designs via additional high-speed capabilities.
OrCAD Component Information Portal provides users with CIS database management capabilities and integrated access to parametric component data through an interactive, web interface directly within the OrCAD Capture CIS product.
OrCAD DFM Checker provides a comprehensive set of manufacturing/fabrication-centric checks for OrCAD PCB Editor. DfM fabrication checks can be run at any time during PCB place and route to help ensure that no fabrication-related issues are present, helping avoid fabrication-related delays, additional costs and re-work.
OrCAD Panel Editor provides an intelligent panel documentation environment for OrCAD PCB Editor that significantly simplifies panel creation and documentation.
OrCAD Sigrity ERC (Electrical Rules Check) provides a comprehensive set of electrical signal quality checks for OrCAD PCB Editor. ERCs are designed to be run by the PCB designer as a first-order electrical validation. This capability enables changes to be made within the design before more extensive and exhaustive analysis is performed.
OrCAD Capture Constraint System enables a constraint-driven PCB design flow for OrCAD Capture and OrCAD PCB Editor. Compared to the existing methodology, the OrCAD Capture Constraint System substantially expands the constraint definition and management methodology in OrCAD Capture.
New technologies include:
OrCAD PCB Editor productivity improvements include Scribble Route, an auto/interactive routing feature, which allows the user to loosely sketch a path for a route as the system figures how to detail-route it, as well as group and contour routing updates and via arrays.
OrCAD PCB Professional high-speed design features now offer enhanced differential pair constraints, propagation constraint support, delay tuning with heads-up display support, net scheduling and impedance constraint support.
OrCAD Signal Explorer is being added to OrCAD Capture technology-based products, enabling front-end signal integrity/signal quality simulation as well as topology exploration and constraint definition. It can also be scaled for additional signal exploration and signal integrity capabilities through OrCAD PCB SI.
Pads suite comes in three configurations with features ranging from schematic capture to advanced hierarchical placement planning and analysis.
Pads Standard performs schematic capture and PCB layout. Comes with starter parts library, parts creation wizard, and archive management.
Pads Standard Plus adds advanced constraint management, high-speed net constraints and routing, central library creation and management, HyperLynx-powered signal/thermal/analog simulation, and variants design.
Pads Professional adds Xpedition-based sketch routing, simultaneous 2D/3D layout, hierarchical placement planning, component and net explorers, and other Valor-based manufacturing and design check tools. Scales to Xpedition Enterprise platform.
Dragonfly 2020 3D inkjet deposition printer is for printed circuit boards. Is said to print multilayer circuits with 10 or more layers in a few hours. Prints blind and buried vias without requiring drilling. For rapid prototyping of PCBs and small batch production.
