DxDesigner for Expedition

System Design
D A T A

DxDesigner, system design platform

While product designs have become more sophisticated, packing in ever greater functionality, the pressure to get to market with these new products as quickly as possible also continues to increase. It is not enough to make incremental improvements new products must be revolutionary in their imaginative use of technology, while continuing to become more affordable. The engineers designing these products need more than simple CAD tools. They need a complete design environment that is tailored toward meeting these challenges. They must be able to optimize their selection of components, factoring in performance, cost, and lead time. They need fast and efficient ways to enter design data, making extensive reuse of existing designs. They must be able to specify and verify aggressive connectivity constraints such as maximum delay or crosstalk. And finally, they must be able to share the design and development effort with teams of designers within and outside the company, located anywhere in the world. A complete, highly integrated design system like Mentor Graphics DxDesigner for Expedition enables design teams to meet these challenges and produce the leading edge product the market demands. www.mentor.com/pcb

Overview

Major product benefits: Brand new client/server architecture and database structure enables true concurrent design across the enterprise environment Provides design engineers with complete part data, optimizing part selection based on performance, cost and lead-time Shortens design capture time by providing efficient design navigation and interconnect definition Reduces design errors that cause board re-spins through the use of a common library common design and layout database Allows the creation of higher performance designs through advanced constraint planning Provides shorter design cycles and lower-cost products through design reuse and variants Optimizes design and manufacturing resources through team design and design data management

DxDesigner for Expedition Choosing the correct parts is critical to creating a successful design. Do the parts meet the designs performance requirements? Are they cost effective? Can they be procured in time to build prototypes? This type of information must be available to the designer in order to meet the product development goals of the project. DxDataBook, included with DxDesigner for Expedition, connects to DMS (Data Management System) or to other corporate part databases. It provides access to the data needed for optimal part selection. Users perform complex searches based on parametric data and then place components in a schematic, automatically adding the required attributes. DxDataBook can also read an existing design and verify that all the part data matches the current information in the database. This ensures that the schematic used to build the final product is consistent with the latest corporate part data. Using the right parts lowers manufacturing expense and reduces the cost of the final product. Capturing Intent As a designer, how do you communicate your powerful ideas? How do you pass along the stringent requirements that you know need to be considered in the development of a new Optimizing Part Selection product? DxDesigner for Expedition provides advanced hierarchical design and navigation tools so that designs can be efficiently partitioned, navigated, and managed. Many components and connectors have hundreds or thousands of pins, and defining the connections to these parts may be difficult to do in a typical schematic. The spreadsheet-based InterConnectivity Editor (ICE) provides a more convenient and less error-prone way of entering large amounts of connectivity data. Nearly all designs now have critical signals that must meet minimal delay requirements, and must be synchronized with other signals to minimize skew. There are also crosstalk and signal integrity requirements that must be specified so that other designers will know how to create the physical design. The Constraint Editor System (CES), included with DxDesigner for Expedition, provides a comprehensive and intuitive environment for specifying the overall performance of your design. Schematic, InterConnectivity table, and constraint entry is fully concurrent. The same database is shared and updated dynamically by all the users, who see each others edits enabling parallelization of tasks. Streamlining the Design Process Once a schematic design is created, it must be smoothly and accurately transitioned to layout. All of the parts used in the schematic must be accurately mapped to the layout footprints. DxDesigner for Expedition uses a common central library, where all the DxDesigner symbols, expedition cells, and pin mappings are defined and stored. This ensures that any part used on a schematic is correctly mapped to a footprint. Both DxDesigner and Expedition share a common database used to represent the connectivity and the constraints of a design. The common database is read from, and written to by DxDesigner and Expedition. This reduces the possibility of having inconsistent design data. The combination of a common library and a common design database together with a traffic light

InterConnect Table Editor

system that dynamically indicates if connectivity and/or constraints are in sync between front-end and back-end, ensures design integrity, and enables a smooth transition of design data from schematic to layout, and back. Capitalizing on Existing Designs

DxDesigner for Expedition

Reusing existing designs is one of the most efficient ways to reduce cycle time, improve quality, and lower product costs. DxDesigner for Expedition supports both logical and physical design reuse. A reuse element can be assigned a special set of reference designators so that it can be easily identified in layout. Once a circuit has been placed, routed, and proven to work, it can be reused on new designs, preserving the careful work that went into the original layout. Reuse elements can also be stored in the corporate database and then accessed through description or key word searches in DxDataBook. Another form of reuse is variant design. DxDesigner offers an optional variant manager tool that allows a common PCB design to have multiple layout variants, including part substitutions or uninstalls. The variants defined in DxDesigner are automatically passed to Expedition for use in manufacturing outputs. Integrating with the Global Environment The libraries and design data used by DxDesigner are managed by DMS, allowing teams located around the world to access preferred parts and share design data. Hardware Platforms: x86 PC, 2GHz or greater Sun UltraSPARC, 1GHz or greater Operating Systems Solaris 8 or later (SPARC) Linux RHEL 3 or later, SLES 10 or later Windows 2000, XP, Vista Windows Server 2003

System Requirements

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Corporate Headquarters Mentor Graphics Corporation 8005 SW Boeckman Road Wilsonville, OR 97070-7777 Phone: 503.685.7000 Fax: 503.685.1204 Silicon Valley Mentor Graphics Corporation 1001 Ridder Park Drive San Jose, California 95131 USA Phone: 408.436.1500 Fax: 408.436.1501

Copyright 2008 Mentor Graphics Corporation. Mentor Graphics is a registered trademarks and Dx Designer, Expedition, Constraint Editor System, DxDataBook and DMS are Trademarks of Mentor Graphics Corporation. All other trademarks mentioned in this document are trademarks of their respective owners.

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07-08 LVG 5306:080619

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