Shift Left: Moving Multiphysics into the Mainstream

Electronic product development projects have traditionally embraced a workflow in which the detailed multiphysics analysis and optimization takes place at a very late stage in the design process, often as the final step of verification and signoff. However, this delay inevitably leads to costly issues that derail budgets and delay time to market as defects in requirements and performance are uncovered. Additional cycles are required to address these issues that ideally should have been discovered and mitigated earlier in the design phase.

Multiphysics Analysis and the Need to Shift Left

As electronic systems have grown incrementally more complex, with more features packed into a smaller footprint, signal rates rising, and production schedules becoming ever more aggressive, there simply is no room or time for multiple design cycles and prototype failures. To succeed in today’s highly competitive electronics markets, a practice called “shift left” is becoming increasingly popular. It serves to find and prevent defects early in the design process/workflow to improve electronic product and system quality and performance by moving engineering tasks to the left as early in the lifecycle as possible. In the world of electronic design automation, shift left is specifically about driving multiphysics analysis technologies from an afterthought in the workflow to becoming an integral part of each phase of the design process at the chip, package, board, and complete system level.

System-Level Design Insight

Fewer and fewer electronic companies are designing just chips. Most chips go into a packaging, onto a board and, finally, into an end product—be it a car, a medical device, or even a hyperscale computing system. In tandem with multiphysics analysis integrated within the design process (aka in-design analysis), engineers also need solutions that enable complete and comprehensive high-speed and high-frequency design and analysis workflows within a single platform that goes beyond the chip and extends out through the entire system.

Cadence Shift Left with In-Design Analysis

This is where the strengths of the Cadence platform, coupled with exceptional multiphysics analysis technologies that are high capacity and high accuracy, are uniquely positioned to deliver a complete and comprehensive solution that, through ready access to in-design analysis, enables shift left to be realized and realizable.

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