CadenceLIVE: Dassault and Cadence

In February, Cadence announced an agreement with the French company Dassault Systèmes. I wrote about it in my monthly update post February 2022 Update. As I said in that post:

The two companies have combined Dassault Systèmes’ 3DEXPERIENCE platform with the Cadence Allegro platform in a joint solution that enables companies to master the multidiscipline modeling, simulation, and optimization of complex, connected electronic systems. With this new multidisciplinary solution, customers can now accelerate their end-to-end system development process while optimizing their design for performance, reliability, manufacturability, supply resilience, compliance, and cost.

At CadenceLIVE Silicon Valley, Mahesh Deshpande of Dassault and Mark Hepburn of Cadence put some flesh on those bones in a presentation titled Enabling Electronic Virtual Twin Through Cadence-Dassault Systèmes Partnership.

I'm assuming you are familiar with Cadence, so I'm not going to do a "Cadence by the numbers" diagram. But you may not be familiar with Dassault. To me, their most well-known product is Catia, a 3D mechanical design system. If you have flown in any modern airliner, it was almost certainly designed using Catia. Here is the "Dassault by the numbers" diagram:

The electronics industry faces challenges since, increasingly they are delivering systems of systems. This requires collaboration across different domains. For example:

• Software: "threads are locked and there is no heap space"
• Mechanical: "need to address stiction in the bearing journal"
• Electronic: "this fiducial placement is all wrong"

Electronics needs to transform due to several big trends:

• New form factors: rigid, flex, rigid-flex, increasing system density
• Components: more functions in smaller packages, faster evolution, supply chain shortages
• Sustainability and compliance: REACH, WEEE Directive, RoHS, SCIP, IEC-62474 declarable substance list
• Number of variants: for example, a telecom equipment OEM with 150 PBA designs (printed board assembly, a board with its parts) per year

This means that the time when electronics products could be considered as a set of separate elements, without links between each other, and obviously developed by highly silo’ed teams, only focused on their own part of the product, is over. It’s time now for company organizations to have a holistic approach and focus on the way that the product’s constituent parts interrelate. This approach requires a dedicated enterprise process architecture, called Model-Based Enterprise, which relies on continuity in process and data across all domains, and a shared view of the final product delivered to the customer.

The phrase "model-based" means representing the real world in the virtual. Mechanical systems, electronic systems, software systems, multi-physics behavior, manufacturing processes, requirements, tests, and so on. The focus of the Dassault/Cadence agreement, at least initially, is on providing continuity from PCB designs to products to create a virtual twin with a common underlying system-level data model. This brings together Dassault's 3DEXPERIENCE platform with Cadence's Allegro. 3DEXPERIENCE provides configuration management, materials data, project management, component management, and more. Allegro provides PCB design using those components and eventually, flowing the design back out from the virtual design world to be manufactured.

To make this work successfully requires a unified data model with electronic semantics. This means one database with real-time collaboration. That means zero files for the user to manage.

So what does a user of Allegro actually see? First, component data is available inside Allegro. The designer can always find parts that mean company policy, taking into account supply chain constraints, company policy, and compliance. There is a seamless combination of Allegro data and enterprise information. The design and the BOM (bill of materials, the list of components) are part of the product structure, fully managed and traceable. The state of the BOM can be quickly determined (parts at risk of obsolescence, cost, acquiring parts). Projects are interactive and web-accessible so that non-Allegro stakeholders can view them (without requiring copies of Allegro) and with role-based access control.

The engineer in Allegro can update 3DEXPERIENCE without needing to leave the context of the design or learn a new environment. There are no manual steps or procedures. It just works in minutes instead of hours.

Summary

DASSAULT 3DEXPERIENCE PLATFORM

• Cross Domain Collaboration
• Virtual Twin Of Entire Product

CADENCE ALLEGRO PLATFORM

• Complete PCB Design Flow
• Electronic Design Data Management & Workflow

Product Realization Inclusive of Electronics

• Out of the Box Integration
• Scalable from Mainstream to Enterprise
• OnPrem to Cloud

Sign up for Sunday Brunch, the weekly Breakfast Bytes email