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BoardSurfers: PCB Electronics - Six Things to Do Before You Actually Place Components on a PCB

By mrigashira | 20 Aug 2019

It's a PCB you are designing. Where do you start? What can you do to make your process more productive and efficient? Are you feeling at lost? Worry not. We will talk about the six things you do before you start placing components on the board, and, of course, if you use PCB Editor, there is the Design Workflow guide to ease the board design process for you.

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PCB Editor
DATA Pulse: Playing Favorites with Parts—Influencing Design Part Selection with a Preferred Parts List

By Auromala | 18 Aug 2019

Life is full of decisions - what college major to opt for, which career path to follow, whether to move cities for a job or stay put, whether to switch career paths midstream for a more fulfilling life. You know what I mean. As a librarian, your professional life is as full of choices and decisions to be made. OK, so maybe they're not as life changing as the ones I've just listed, but they're important. However, it...

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allegro edm | PCB design
BoardSurfers: Five Ways to View Your Design in 3D Canvas

By Monika | 13 Aug 2019

Five simple yet effective ways to increase efficiency by selecting the right objects you want to model, say, all the pins or a subset of the pins in a design.

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3D Canvas | 3d view | PCB Editor | 3D | 3D viewer
BoardSurfers - Aerials and Bails: How to Rename Reference Designators Using Batch Command

By Monika | 6 Aug 2019

Components on a board are often placed per their functional group and hence their reference designators are all jumbled up. It is a common practice to rename reference designators before sending out the design data to manufacturers. Reference designator...

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PCB Editor | Allegro PCB Editor
BoardSurfers: Capturing Design Intent for Automatic Routing in PCB Editor

By mrigashira | 31 Jul 2019

Imagine you are designing a complex board with thousands of interconnects and all the usual complexities inherent in a dense design that is also highly constrained. Well, it's easy, the 'imagine' part; and you don't even have to try like John Lennon had crooned in his Imagine song, because most probably you are actually designing one right now that is dominated by bussed interconnect. And most probably your mind is stretched...

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PCB Editor
BoardSurfers: Designing a Rigid-Flex Board Using PCB Editor

By mrigashira | 26 Jul 2019

Whether you are designing the latest pace-maker or a LED strip, you have definitely pondered awhile about rigid PCBs and flex PCBs. You might have gone through a pile of literature, called up friends who have already done it (after all flex PCBs have been around for more than half a century now), and deliberated with your team to finally settle on a rigid-flex PCB. Well, what had started as a cutting-edge requirement...

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PCB Editor | Rigid-Flex
DATA Pulse: In Search of the Perfect Environment—Configuring Allegro EDM

By Auromala | 22 Jul 2019

Ah, the office temperature – that eternal debate. As in many offices, ours has some people who feel that they're in the Sahara Desert, others who bundle up like they're in Antarctica, a few who just don't care about the temperature, and some who can't quite figure out if they're ever comfortable, like Goldilocks. There is however no 'perfect' temperature. So many variables impact the physical environment of the office...

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allegro edm | PCB design
BoardSurfers: Avoid Iterations with Your Manufacturing Partner – Detect and Address DFM Issues in the Design Phase Using DesignTrue DFM

By mrigashira | 16 Jul 2019

Some things are rare, good or bad, but they do happen from time to time. And, some happen so regularly, we often take them for granted if good or learn to live with them if bad. But should we? For example, you send out your design for fabrication and the CAM (computer-aided manufacturing) engineer runs a high-end design for manufacturability (DFM) analysis software. The CAM engineer sees DFM issues (almost always!)....

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DesignTrue | Allegro PCB Editor
BoardSurfers: Look Before You Leap - Verifying Footprints in the Design Capture Phase

By mrigashira | 9 Jul 2019

View the footprints of symbols during design entry in Capture: verify the footprint and land pattern dimension before exporting your design to a board layout tool, such as PCB Editor,

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Capture CIS | PCB Editor | footprint viewer
BoardSurfers - Guest Roll: Anatomy of a Good Testcase

By Tyler | 2 Jul 2019

Rik Lee, the author of today's post, is a PCB Designer with more than 35 years experience in the PCB industry, 25+ of those with the Cadence® Allegro® tools. Currently working with Samtec, he has previously worked for both Cadence and EMA, focusing on back-end PCB layout tool support. You come across an issue when using the tools, but you don’t understand why. Being able to troubleshoot an issue, and if needed provide...

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APD | PCB Editor | SiP Layout
DATA Pulse: Know How to Effectively Manage Part Obsolescence (Part 2 of 2)

By Auromala | 2 Jul 2019

In part 1 of this two-part blog post, we analyzed how you can define a parts lifecycle manager, define and assign lifecycle states to parts, then distribute the latest parts to designers. In part 2, you're the designer and you want to know which parts to use in your design. The initial PCB design – how did you come up with it? Doodled it on a piece of paper? Hashed it out in conference room meetings where at least...

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Library and design data management | EDM | PCB design
BoardSurfers - Aerials and Bails: Take a Walk on the Wild Side...with Auto-Roaming

By Tyler | 25 Jun 2019

We have had this question before, so it’s a good one to remind everyone of in case you’re not aware of it. What I usually hear asked is how can you have the tool automatically pan/roam when your cursor gets to the edge of the canvas. The good news is that this is there today for you; it may just be that you don’t realize it! To make sure that you don’t pan the canvas at times when you don’t intend to, you will have...

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APD | PCB Editor | SiP Layout
BoardSurfers - Aerials and Bails: How to Split a Viastack

By Monika | 20 Jun 2019

Today’s compact and powerful devices require small and high-density PCBs. Tight routing around densely packed components is thus indispensable, but cannot be achieved using conventional blind-buried and through-hole vias. Consequently, stacked vias have become an essential element of contemporary PCB designs. Stacked vias can be used in place of through-hole vias by placing multiple vias exactly over each other, taking...

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APD | PCB Editor | SiP Layout | Allegro
DATA Pulse: Know How to Effectively Manage Part Obsolescence (Part 1 of 2)

By Auromala | 16 Jun 2019

This is the first of a two-part blog post on managing part obsolescence using Allegro ® EDM applications. In the midst of a periodic bout of decluttering the house, my niece stumbled across some cassettes and looked at them like they were from some prehistoric age. How could I convey the importance of the audio cassette to my niece? She's used to iTunes, YouTube, Spotify, and goodness knows what else. I remember cassettes...

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allegro edm | Library and design data management | EDM | PCB design
BoardSurfers: Text Labels and Film Views Help Intelligent Designers

By Tyler | 11 Jun 2019

Last time, I talked about color and visibility as it relates to simplifying your design canvas display to make your work easier. Today, we take the next step forward: using your artwork films to drive what you see on screen, as well as dynamic text labels to help you find objects. We’ll close out with a reminder of how to recycle the time you’ve spent setting up one design across all your designs. Artwork Films as...

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APD | Allegro Package Designer | Allegro PCB Editor | SiP Layout
BoardSurfers: Easier Design Work Through Colors, Patterns, and Visibility

By Tyler | 4 Jun 2019

PCB and IC Package substrates these days are complex. Multiple layers, hundreds to thousands of components and pins, degassed and cross-hatched shapes, routing, and everything in between can make the visual depiction of your layout imposing, to put it mildly. How, then, do you reclaim control? Focus on exactly what you need to see and when you need to see it? Are there ways to simplify determining whether the via you...

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APD | PCB Editor | PCB design | SiP Layout
BoardSurfers - Aerials and Bails: Minimum Screen Resolutions and Large Forms

By Tyler | 25 May 2019

The Cadence® Allegro® backend layout tools are large, complex, highly-capable environments that provide you with a massive amount of functionality. Whether you are designing a rigid-flex PCB , a BGA package, an interposer, or something else entirely, they provide the features you need to accomplish the task. However, with great functionality comes great… big forms, at times. Some of the largest forms in Allegro are...

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PCB Editor | Allegro Package Designer | PCB design | SiP Layout
BoardSurfers: Make Menus Your Own – Customizing Menus and Toolbars with Things You Use Daily

By Tyler | 3 May 2019

Flexibility and the ability to customize the software/environment to your own personal needs is a definite strength of Cadence® software, and the Allegro® platform is no different. Whether you are developing your own SKILL program to make a detailed flow easier; automating a tedious, but routine, task; or just reordering commands in the menu to match your usage flow, Allegro offers you what you need. Best of all, it...

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Allegro PCB Editor | SiP Layout | SKILL
BoardSurfers - Aerials and Bails: How to Hide the Design Path in Art File

By Monika | 25 Apr 2019

Before manufacturing, PCB fabricators analyze Gerber data to verify if it is manufacturable or not. If the artwork data meets the requirement, it is processed to make it usable by production tools and equipment. The various stages of data analysis and processing are automated at the manufacturer's end. Depending on the PCB maker you are working with, you may need to create artwork data files per their requirement. ...

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Gerber | Manufacture | artwork | environment variable | Allegro PCB Editor
BoardSurfers: Place Replicate to Increase IP Reuse and Decrease Design Time

By Tyler | 15 Apr 2019

Once you have successfully designed and optimized an area of your substrate today, how do you leverage your tool to reuse your work across the rest of your current design – or apply it to other similar layouts in your queue? If you have the good fortune to use the Cadence® Allegro® layout tools, you should turn to the place replicate interface. Whether you want to leverage just the symbol placement, incorporate additional...

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Place Replicate Module | Allegro PCB Editor
BoardSurfers: Validating Your Shapes

By Tyler | 3 Apr 2019

Your design is near completion. Except that you’ve got an area of your plane shape that stubbornly refuses to fill, and you don’t know why. Understanding the rules involved and the tools available to help you figure out – and make changes, if needed, to get the result you want – is critical to make sure you aren’t wasting valuable design cycles. Thankfully, the Cadence® Allegro® platform provides you with the exact...

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PCB Editor | PCB design and layout | Shape Checks | Allegro
BoardSurfers: Dynamic Shape Voiding – Getting the Most Out of the Tool

By Tyler | 28 Mar 2019

Dynamic shapes; whether used on a negative or positive artwork layer, for power, ground, or signal; are the next most common element of a design after components and routing. The importance of using them effectively, then, can be the difference between a design that is DRC-free, ready on time, and easy to update for ECOs (Engineering Change Orders) and one that you seem to struggle with on a daily basis trying to force...

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Constraint Manager | PCB design | Allegro PCB Editor
BoardSurfers: Allegro 3D Canvas—Visualize the Board as You Design

By Monika | 18 Mar 2019

Today’s dense and complex PCB designs require realistic 3D view to investigate the design issues way before they are ready for manufacturing. The complexity of the PCB designs is increasing significantly with time and visualizing all the design components to address electronic and mechanical design issues in a single consistent environment has become a challenge. To cater to this need Cadence® Allegro® PCB Design Solutions...

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PCB | Layout | 3D | PCB design | Allegro PCB Editor
Teardrops and Tapers – Improving Manufacturability and Yield Automatically

By Tyler | 13 Mar 2019

Teardrops (also called fillets) are the blending area of a cline entry into a pad, while tapers are the gradual transition from one line-width to another along a path. These two core concepts appear in nearly any PCB or IC package substrate today. They act to smoothen the intersection of the two objects, eliminating acute angle acid traps while also contributing to better signal integrity along the path. However, any...

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PCB Layout and routing | IC Packaging and SiP Design | PCB Editor | Allegro PCB Editor
Simulation for a Song: Downloading Models from the Web and Associating with Parts for PSpice Simulation

By mrigashira | 7 Feb 2019

While on a long drive, I like to sing along; say Eye of the Tiger or Johny B Goode or Sweet Home Alabama (even though I don’t live in Alabama), the music being an active part of the journey, especially when I am just beginning the drive, fresh and eager, looking forward to the trekking and wildlife sightings. Compare this with the schematic design phase. Whistling and nodding while placing the parts: here’s the library...

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capture | Models | PSPICE | OrCAD | simulation

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