Technical Publications
TeamPCB: The Next Paradigm Change Begins
Everyone in the electronics industry is looking for ways to increase productivity, reduce costs and shorten time-to-market. Processes have been reviewed and tweaked over and over, and serial methods of round-the-clock and round-the-world design of large boards has become popular again. Since PCB software vendors heralded design reuse and variants tools in the early-to-mid 1990's breakthrough methodology adjustments or paradigm changes that can enable dramatic productivity improvements have not been unveiled. It seems as if just keeping up with new manufacturing technology and high-speed requirements has kept EDA vendors fully occupied-until now. The Systems Design Division of Mentor Graphics delivers TeamPCB and a series of other new products this year.
TeamPCB is available as an add-on option for Board Station and Expedition PCB , running on Windows and Unix platforms.
3.125 Gbps with your Hair on Fire - Simulation-Based Signal-Integrity Analysis of Digital Interconnects at Multi-Gigabit Speeds
As clock frequencies and data rates soar, system designers are being forced to account for the effects of degraded high-frequency signals, causing otherwise healthy signals to be potentially unrecognizable at receiver ICs. This technical paper will focus on simulation-based signal-integrity analysis of multi-gigabit interconnects using Mentor Graphics' HyperLynx{reg} GHz product. Techniques will be presented for using both HSPICE and IBIS buffer models in concurrent simulations; along with eye-diagram and jitter analysis using multi-bit stimuli, while accounting for line loss, inter-symbol interference, and advanced via modeling.
The Benefits of FPGAs: Are they consumed by the obstacles of integrating FPGAs on a PCB?
FPGAs have proven to be a valuable technology in today's electronic industry, offering performance, time-to-market, and cost advantages. Evidence of their pervasiveness is the fact that almost every Printed Circuit Board (PCB) now contains at least one FPGA. But, does the process of putting the FPGA on a PCB compromise those highly valued benefits? This paper examines the move from ASIC to FPGA technology, and the impact of FPGA on board integration today.