Designing a PCB in Harmony with Your 3D Extraction Expert

You know who we are talking about.  The guy in the corner with all the PhDs hanging in his/her office.  Everyone goes to Mr/Ms. 3D-Expert to get their 3D structures analyzed.  He/She knows all the bells and whistles and can make a tool that mere mortals might not want to tackle sing like a canary.

The problem is, when he/she analyzes your 3D structure, and gives you all the changes you need to make, you’ve still got a lot of work on your plate.  It might take you days to fully understand exactly what he/she wanted and then redraw that structure in your layout design tool. The iterations may go on for several runs before you can finalize your design.

Our Allegro and Sigrity tools are tackling this problem. If you can get Mr/Ms. 3D-Expert to start using Sigrity 3D-EM, you will no longer have to redraw his/her optimized structure in your Allegro layout tool.  You just import it right into your design.  Done!

That optimized structure is then reusable throughout your design or on future designs.

Why should you care?

You need to have a predictable design schedule.  You’ve got interface compliance standards that you need to meet.  Iterating with Mr/Ms. 3D-Expert is not in your best interest.

Companies using Allegro and Sigrity tools are working with their 3D extraction analyst in harmony.  They bring structures such as via arrays into Sigrity 3D-EM and let the 3D extraction analyst work his/her magic.  The resulting optimized structure is simply loaded into Allegro and there is no mess and no fuss.

Watch the Sigrity Tech Tip below for more information on the Allegro-Sigrity High Speed Structure Optimization (HSSO) flow.

Those of you that were at DesignCon 2018 probably heard one of our top customers tell of their successes using this flow.  Based on their input we plan to incorporate our growing expertise in DFM to make this flow even more useful.  Check out our DesignCon 2018 page for more information on this paper.

Team Sigrity