CES for Board Station XE Flow

Course Highlights

CES is a Constraint Editor System, which gives you the ability to define and refine design constraints in a common environment that is accessible from many Mentor Graphics Corporation front-end and back-end design systems.

The labs in the course allow you to gain hands-on experience with the tool, defining both mechanical and high-speed constraints to meet today’s challenging PCB designs.

You will learn how to

• Define the main concepts and constraints hierarchy of CES.
• Enable CES as a constraint system in Board Station flow.
• Find and filter data in the design database.
• Navigate and manipulate the constraints hierarchy.
• Use the spreadsheets, toolbars, preferences, and options efficiently.
• Partition the design data using Net Classes, Constraint Classes and Schemes.
• Set up mechanical constraints such as trace widths, via assignments and clearances.
• Assign physical high-speed constraints including minimum and maximum delays, matched delays, delay formulas, custom and complex topologies, differential pairs, and parallelism rules to nets or group of nets.
• Auto-route the constrained nets and evaluate the routing results.
• Reuse already defined constraints in the same design or other designs using Constraint Templates.

Hands-on Lab

• Adopting CES and synchronizing databases in Design Architect/Board Architect to Board Station XE Flow
• User Interface
  • Customizing the Windows Display
  • Use the CES Browser and the Spreadsheets
  • Edit Data in Spreadsheets
  • Interface with the PCB Data
• Creating Net Class and Schemes
  • Create Schemes
  • Create and populate Net Classes
• Setting Up Mechanical Constraints
  • Set up Trace and Via Properties
  • Set up Clearance Rules
• Creating Constraint Classes
• Setting up Differential Pairs and Net Properties
  • Create differential pairs
  • Set differential pair constraints
  • Assign custom topologies
  • Assign complex topologies
• Setting up delays and parallelism
  • Assign length and match group constraints
  • Set up delays formulas
  • Set up parallelism rules
  • Route delay and length constrained nets
• Using Constraint Templates
  • Import and export Constraint Templates
  • Test Constraint Templates
• Assign Constraint Templates to nets

Key Topics

• CES Overview
• CES in the flow
• CES User Interface
• Net Classes and Schemes
• Setting up Mechanical Constraints
• Creating Constraint Classes
• Net Properties and Differential Pairs
• Delays and Parallelism
• Using constraint templates