Deja Vue all over again.

Deja Vue all over again.

When I graduated from RPI in 1967, I joined a small group of CAD software developers in IBM Federal Systems Division in Owego, NY.  Our job was to write placement and routing software for the design of military computers (fire control, navigation, ….).  John Cooper, later of Cooper and Chyan Technology (CCT) fame, was writing the routing software.   I had responsibility for the placement and front-end capabilities.  At that time, the challenge we faced was how to best place components on a PCB (creating the shortest interconnect lengths) and then how to route those interconnects most efficiently (shortest lengths, highest percent of completion, follow the manufacturing rules).  Sound familiar???

Here we are 40 years later and we still have the same challenges.  Providing software to designers that enables them to place components on a PCB and route the interconnects.  Are we that slow or has the electronics industry changed, progressed just enough to keep pace with our design technology advances?  I claim we are not that slow and the challenges faced by our customers have in fact increased in complexity by orders of magnitude.

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The state-of-the-art 40 years ago was inch square, 14 or 16 leaded flatpack components that contained 3-6 gates of logic operating at millisecond speeds.  Today we have packages with thousands of leads (FPGAs with 1700, ASICs with 3000), pin densities of up to 4000 per square inch, up to 1 billion transistors, and speeds in the gigabits per second.  We are all familiar with Moore’s law that tracks IC complexity advances.  Well, this complexity flows down to the PCB and we (actually you as designers) are faced with similar challenges.  Also, compounding the problem, is the need to design some of these products, start to delivery, in months.  40 years ago, we measured our product design schedules in years.

So, deja vue or has the electronics industry created a moving target for designers and therefore for Mentor as a PCB systems design supplier?  10 years from now I might be retired but if the complexity keeps increasing at current rates (exponential), we will look back and think of today’s challenges as simplistic.

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