To allow electronics companies designing large printed circuit boards (PCBs) to auto-route up to 15 processors and cut routing times from days to hours, Wilsonville, Ore.-based Mentor Graphics Corp. today rolled out its XtremeAR product – the second product to use the company’s Xtreme design technology.
The productivity improvement and design cycle time reduction are meant to improve time-to-market for large designs, and improve quality and system performance by allowing designers to perform several design trials and choose the best results, Mentor says.
Mentor’s patented Xtreme design technology provides the core for the capability to support multiple clients on a LAN or WAN network to simultaneously update a centrally located PCB design database.
In November 2004, Mentor detailed its first application of the Xtreme design technology, XtremePCB that allows multiple CAD designers to simultaneously perform interactive place and route on a PCB with real time updates to a common database. XtremePCB was targeted at users performing manual routing and resulted in design cycle time reductions of 40-70 percent during the layout process.
With XtremeAR, the company says the next application of the technology is targeted at users who are able to auto-route their large boards. XtremeAR uses the processors from up to 15 computers on a LAN or WAN network working simultaneously on the same PCB database to cut routing times by up to ten times and utilize second and third shift computer resources that would ordinarily be idle.
Not only do these savings result in shorter design cycle times and higher designer productivity, but are meant to allow for better design quality and system performance by giving designers time to run several trial component placements and routing scenarios and then pick the best results.
XtremeAR is available now and utilizes the same licenses as XtremePCB clients, giving users the flexibility to use the Xtreme design technology on either manual layout or auto-routing depending on their needs.
Customer Nick Barbin, president of Optimum Design Associates, said in a statement, “As an award winning service bureau, our customers are continuing to require shorter design cycle times. With XtremeAR, we can reduce our layout times on large boards by days and even weeks. This puts us at a competitive advantage and enables our customer to get to market faster.”
