Please take a look at the new PADS website at http://www.mentor.com/pcb/pads/overview/. There is some cool, new stuff here: Virtual Labs, Online Chat, new video snippets, and much more!
I would also like to invite you to sign up and attend a new webinar I’ll be giving June 27 and 28: Five Ways to “Start Smarter” with PADS. The quick overview of the webinar:
“Struggling to get your products designed … Read More
Autorouting is a nasty word to many designers. Many would not be caught dead doing anything other than interactively routing the complete design. Their reasoning may be sound – but dated. Past generation routers would run a long time, only to leave a design with blocked channels, too many vias, traces that looped around the board, not to mention poor, if any, adherence to high-speed rules. They … Read More
Lots of good things coming – very soon! Check this video snippet out!
Jim
… Read More
Simple schematic capture is not enough anymore. You need a tool that won’t get in your way as you are creating your new design. One that will let you quickly choose the best components for your design. One that can speed up the wiring of the components. A tool that has design reuse, hierarchy, and variant management to help you organize and optimize the schematic. One that lets you start your simulation … Read More
Many connectors and other components require decals/footprints that have their pins laid out in a polar pattern. In many CAD systems, this can be a time consuming effort to build these in the library. It can be done very quickly in PADS!
Bill Tkachuk CSD AE, recently wrote TechNote MG582079 that steps the user through building these devices. If you have access to SupportNet, you can view a video … Read More
When designing a PCB, most of your time may be spent interactively routing.
PADS has always been known for having powerful, yet easy to use interactive routing capabilities to help engineers and designers in this phase of the design process. You need the ability to quickly connect the easy traces (is there such a thing anymore?) as well as be assured that your critical nets with length constraints, … Read More
Do you use PADS? Did you know that the PADS ES Suite ships with the DxDesigner Schematic Editor providing a robust and powerful design environment tightly coupled to PADS layout with DxDatabook a powerful component information system and cross probing.
With an innovative and reliable architecture, designed from the start to support hierarchy; a user needs only to create a circuit once before reusing … Read More
Taking a look at PADS is now easier than ever – we’re on the Cloud! The full PADS ES Suite Evaluation is still available to download, but if you want a quick and easy way to evaluate PADS, check out the Virtual Labs.
Here, you will have access to the full PADS ES Suite to evaluate, with lessons and exercises on simulation and analysis, design capture and CIS, and PCB layout and routing.
No installation, … Read More
Unbelieveable! Don’t get me wrong, it is not the fact that pop-up ads appear all over commercial websites that annoys me; after all, we have had the same thing in magazines and newspapers for many years. Advertisements appear almost everywhere these days, the funding from which is an important part of many companies’ business plans. This is not the issue. The issue starts with the difference between … Read More
Are you doing any simulation today, specifically for signal integrity issues? Many design professionals believe that simulaiton is only needed for really bleeding-edge technology. But in my recent meetings with customers, they are finding they need to simulate designs that once did not. Even on simpler consumer electronic devices, or industrial controllers, the components they need to purchase for … Read More
Have you ever wanted to, or had the requirement to print a color image of a Decal? This can be done directly in the Decal Editor.
In this PADS Tip and Trick, Bill Tkachuk from CSD explains how:
1. Load a decal into the Decal Editor and zoom to extents
2. Define the visible colors you want printed
3. Open the Output Window by going to View > Output Window
4. Select the Macro tab within the … Read More
Nepcon China Rocks! There is so much going on, so much potential, so many companies focussed on success, to be the best in their field, to be number one. Electronics in the West is like the Mississippi river, huge and powerful, but slow moving, quite boring actually. In China, it is like the riding the rapids. This is where skill and vision come in to play.
Creating the best production factory is the … Read More
Altera goes back to 1984, when you could get 720KB on a floppy. After all these years, FPGAs still provide the right mix of being flexible like software while still being fixed and fast like hardware. Why does this cool idea persist in new product designs?
Fortunately the big FPGA vendors, such as Xilinx, have continued to invest in R&D. Innovations from internal genius and acquisitions have … Read More
They say that you are what you eat. If so, it means that many people in the UK are rather more horse than they thought. Endless jokes about “why such a long face?” aside, this really shouldn’t have been a surprise. For years now, there has been food on sale in the UK simply described as “meat”, such as meat pies, meat sausages etc. When someone asked about what the meat actually was, DNA testing was … Read More
Today’s Tip and Trick comes from Bill Tkachuk in customer support.
PADS Layout has very powerful split plane functionality. Along with this, it gives the user great control on how to change, modify, and customize the thermal relief and antipads in these splits.
Bill wrote a great TechNote (MG581658) which gives step-by-step directions on how to create split planes, set default thermal and antipads, … Read More