Cadence Customers Share Experiences with Revolutionary PCB Design Methodology

PCB design teams are often caught in a repetitive cycle of design and simulation with multiple iterations to meet PCB design constraints. At CadenceLIVE Silicon Valley 2025, Cadence customers Priya Boopalan of ZF, a global technology company supplying advanced mobility products and systems for passenger cars, commercial vehicles and industrial technology, and Gopichandran Annadurai of Formfactor Inc., a leading provider of essential test and measurement technologies along the full IC life cycle, explained how tools from Cadence can improve the PCB design process by shifting the simulation phase earlier in the design flow. The presentation is now available to view on demand.

In this blog, Priya and Gopi share how using Sigrity X Aurora PCB Analysis integrated into the Allegro X Design platform reduces PCB design cycle time and offer additional insights regarding their experiences with the software.

MIPI Interfaces in PCB Designs at ZF Automotive

Priya tells us how MIPI interfaces (camera to processor) were efficiently integrated into ZF Automotive PCB designs.

“Designing PCBs for automotive applications commonly requires that we manage low power and electromagnetic interference/compatibility (EMI/EMC) requirements, as well as meet high-speed data signaling compliance. Our PCB design team recently improved the time to complete a design by shifting simulation directly into the hands of the designer. Utilizing Cadence Sigrity X Aurora PCB Analysis, our designers could remain in their design tool environment while checking for impedance discontinuities and excessive crosstalk, and even generate S-parameters to validate insertion and return loss of high-speed differential pairs. This “digital twin” approach proved much more efficient than the traditional SI/PI simulation that takes place after a design has been fully routed. We found that our mobile industry processor interface (MIPI) camera units could be completed 40% faster once we switched to in-design analysis.

Large Complex PCB Designs at Formfactor

Gopi shares how large complex PCB designs at Formfactor are efficiently analyzed using automated selective cutting to auto-crop the design to the area of concern.

Image courtesy of Formfactor

“The design of test boards at Formfactor can be very challenging due to their large size, large number of layers, and high density of routed interconnect. It is our goal to design every board as quickly as possible while ensuring high-quality power delivery along with pristine signal quality with precisely matched signal delay. In-design analysis, in the past, always meant that we had to stop and translate our design into a simulation tool. This quickly became untenable due to the massive size of our designs. However, with Sigrity X Aurora PCB Analysis, we can put the focus on a subset of the design from within the design tool and quickly evaluate both our signal and power goals. This blending of design and analysis has improved design efficiency, allowing us to complete our test boards in half the time. Because many of our design team members are not experts in signal and power integrity, we’ve requested Cadence to use their powerful AI engines to optimize the design when our goals are not being met. This may mean adjusting trace width/length/spacing and/or adding stitching vias to improve the signal return path of our high-speed signals.

Conclusion

Sigrity X Aurora PCB Analysis enables companies like ZF and Formfactor to streamline their PCB design process and deliver their products to market more quickly through in-design analysis that provides quick and accurate results, as well as allowing designers to locate and fix issues early in the design cycle. Aurora simulation times are 10X faster than traditional methods, and the auto-cropping feature reduces the size of the design database and lets designers focus on the areas of concern.

Cadence thanks Priya and Gopi for their expertise and for sharing their experience and vision for PCB in-design analysis. To watch their CadenceLIVE presentation on demand, please register for CadenceLIVE and visit the multiphysics track.