What's Good About Allegro Package Designer (APD) Bond Wire "Text In?" You’ll Need the 16.6 Release to See!

Cadence IC Packaging tools today provide a spreadsheet-based import mechanism for die and BGA (standard) components, as well as for importing of netlist updates. In certain design scenarios, particularly for leadframe package designs, it is also desirable to be able to import a similarly formatted file to define the bond wire connections in the design. In this way, when an updated component is brought into the design from another tool, the bond wire text file can be used to quickly update the mapping of pins to leads/fingers/etc. It can also be used to read updated information from the package manufacturer if changes need to be made to the wire profile assignments.

The 16.6 Allegro Package Designer (APD) product provides this capability.

Read on for more details …
 
This tool does not import existing customer flows. It provides a new mechanism for importing bond wires into the design, and may be used in place of the “wirebond add,” “wirebond import,” or SKILL commands to create bond wires in the design. 
  
  
Menu
 
Menu Pick: Route  > Wire Bond > Bond Wire Text Import:

 
 
Command-Line Access

Command line: bondwire text in
 
Example

We have a die we need to import bond wires into:

 
 
Upon launching the tool, you must select the text file to be imported:

 

The text file provided must have information for each bond wire being imported:
 
     1.  Start location of each wire: X/Y coordinate and the layer name
     2.  End location of each wire: X/Y coordinate and the layer name
 
Wire profile – Optional. If not set the tool uses the default profile for design.
 
This text file contains the information mentioned above:

 
 
 
 
Once selected, you can select the delimiter and units before proceeding to the main wizard page to select the columns of information (if not automatically detected from the header line in the file):

 
 
From this file, if any padstacks are not defined, the wizard page to define them will be presented.
 
In this next step we must set the columns to accurately represent their contents.  
The graphic below shows the information needed to import wire bonds.
Using the RMB we can set the columns as needed:

 
 
On the final page of the wizard, you can confirm the results and commit to the database.
The wires are imported as shown below:

 
 

I look forward to your comments on using this new 16.6 capability!

Jerry "GenPart" Grzenia