What's Good About Support Service And Design Bureau Providers? AcAe Can Help!

I usually discuss our SPB solution technical capabilities in my weekly blogs, but decided to chat about this week's press announcement - "Cadence Teams with AcAe to Accelerate Customer Transitions to Allegro PCB Products" - and ask what works the best for you when you've engaged with a design services company.

Of course, Cadence offers services to help our customers enhance their design environments, ramp-up  quickly on their solution/flow, and collaborate on techniques.

Some key points from the press announcement:

“The translation results from Expedition to Allegro PCB Editor look great,” said Brian Doherty, manufacturing engineer of Polychromix Incorporated. “I wasn’t sure what to expect based on how other translators have historically handled design translations but the Allegro design is a one-for-one match in every way that I can see. By utilizing the services provided by AcAe, we were able to save weeks in our re-spin cycle thereby comfortably meeting our schedule demands.”

Cadence customers migrating to Allegro PCB solutions can now take advantage of the worldwide onsite and remote access design services that AcAe provides, including Cadence Allegro library development, schematic entry and PCB design layout services.

“As more companies turn to Cadence to address their toughest PCB challenges, AcAe’s capabilities and experience should make the migration of legacy data and integration of our products easier than ever,” said Linda Mazzitelli, product marketing director at Cadence Design Systems. “That can translate to improved productivity with shorter implementation time. With AcAe and Cadence working together, customers can count on a team of experienced professionals to help them make a smooth transition to our world-class PCB technology.”

“AcAe software has taken migration from the dark ages of translators into the 21st century. Our DART technology can migrate the most complex PCB designs with an ease and accuracy never before achieved,” said Bill Basten, CEO of AcAe (www.AcAe.com). “This means companies moving to Cadence PCB technology can likely avoid spending days or weeks performing ‘cleanup’ on poorly translated data. Migrated data is fully usable and ready to go.”

A few questions for you:

1. When you contract with a Services/Design Bureau, is it based on time constraints/resources (work critical to be completed ASAP) or part of your standard operations?
2. Do you prefer to be involved with knowledge transfer (learn the details about the "how") or want the provider to just complete the contracted work?
3. Do you utilize traditional Design Bureaus (for PCB Layout work), or engage with services providers to help with design migrations/translations, training, etc.?

As always, I welcome your input and suggestions.


Jerry "GenPart" Grzenia