Hard to Believe

Hard to Believe

Back in the late ‘90s, I felt I wasn’t getting enough abuse and needed to spend a lot more time working for no pay, so I ran for my community’s school board. One of the reasons that I ran was that the school district had fumbled two applications for funding from the state and received just $400,000 over the previous four years.  Making that a priority, the district received more than $2.5 million over the next four years.

On the completion of my term, I noted on my campaign literature that during the four years I had served, we had increased funds received from the state by 625%. Shortly after distributing some of the flyers, I received an email from a constituent. It was simple and concise: “I don’t believe you.”

And who could blame him — 625% is a huge change. But, in fact it was true.

I received a call from Steve McKinney the other day. Steve is our Business Development Manager for Mentor’s PCB Analysis products.  He had been in contact with a customer, who was an early adopter of HyperLynx PI (power integrity), that had experienced some extraordinary results and was willing to have a customer success story written about their experiences.

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As I reviewed the data, it suddenly dawned on me what the sender of that email must have felt:  the numbers were almost too incredible to believe.  But, in fact it is true.

We will post the full story in a few weeks, but I wanted to share this story with you since it shows just the kind of results HyperLynx PI can achieve, and to demonstrate how attention to power integrity can aid your future designs.

One of the cool things about this story is that the email chain begins with a skeptical customer expressing very cautious interest in attacking a nagging power issue with HyperLynx PI, and ends with truly fantastic results.

The customer was having intermittent problems with a new design, manifested in the usual ways — boot errors and memory problems. They were able to determine that the problem was being caused by voltage drop across the board. The five engineers investigating the problem were split: three proposed adding a large number of stitching vias to equalize the voltage, and two proposed moving from ¼ oz. copper to 2 oz. copper.

Fortunately, our hero had recently attended a HyperLynx PI workshop and suggested they give the tool a try. Having all agreed, they found the tool quite easy to set up and in no time at all astonished themselves with the accuracy of the results. The visual presentation in HyperLynx PI easily led them to the problem.

With the HyperLynx PI data, they were able to determine that lack of conductor was the problem, and going with the stitching via solution would have wasted a prototype run and weeks of effort.  Likewise, using a SWAG to specify 2 oz copper would have driven the cost-per-board through the roof.  Instead, with real data, they determined that 1 oz copper was more than enough and the problem was resolved.  They estimated that HyperLynx PI saved six months of work and potentially hundreds of dollars per board in unnecessary copper thickness.

Difficult to believe numbers? 

Almost…but this is really an incredible product.

If you’d like to see more about HyperLynx PI, the continuing webinars’ next date is December 2, 2009 from 2pm to 3pm EST and is entitled  “Optimizing Power Delivery with Effective Decoupling.”

 On the signal integrity front, HyperLynx SI is another gee whiz tool, and its wizards make setting complex memory interface simulations a breeze.  That discussion will have to wait for another time though, as I’m out of space for this installment.

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