Symphony Team Design - A solution for multiple designers to work concurrently on a design in real time

Allegro® PCB Symphony Team Design is a new product option, which is a concurrent design environment where multiple users can connect to a common database for collaborative design activities.

The older PCB Team Design product option has been part of Allegro® PCB Editor for some time. This solution requires partitioning of the master design into separate sections so that each team member can perform design activities. These sections are exported from the master database as partition databases so that each team member can work independently on their assigned section. After work is completed, the individual design partitions are imported into the master database to get a clear picture of the complete design. It requires some disruption in the design activities to carry out the import process.

In the 17.4 release, a new concurrent design solution called the Allegro® PCB Symphony Team Design option has been introduced. The Allegro Symphony Team Design option allows users to connect to a common database to perform collaborative design activities such that each team member sees the design updates in real time. A formal project team can be formed, or at a moment's notice, designers can simply share their current design and invite other designers to join for assistance. This provides an ad-hoc solution for multiple designers to work concurrently on placement, routing, and in-design analysis in real time.

The architecture of this concurrent solution is summarized in the figure below. It shows a server process controlling a PCB board or a package file, and Layout Editor clients connecting to it using TCP-Sockets.

Once the Symphony Team Design option is enabled in the product options list, you will see the respective menu options under the File menu.

Team PCBTech

Cadence Design Systems