Bring the future to your desktop

Transcription

1 Bring the future to your desktop

2 The process of developing electronics is undergoing some fundamental changes. Changes that are likely to be as significant as those that followed the availability of low-cost microprocessors more than 20 years ago. The ability to embed whole systems, hardware and software, in low-cost, high-capacity programmable devices (FPGAs) is ushering in a very different view of the design process. Harnessing the opportunities created by this change, and tackling the problems that it raises, are examples of the challenges that must be faced. At Altium, we are passionate about putting the best available design technology into the hands of every engineer. This is the reason that I formed the company more than two decades ago, and continues as our driving force today. We're dedicated to providing systems that not only serve your current design needs, but also help you navigate fundamental changes in the electronics industry. Whether you are working alone, as part of a small team, or as part of a larger organization whether it's coping with an increasingly 'soft' design environment, or harnessing the power of today's powerful, low-cost desktop computers we can help you be successful in electronic product development and move confidently into the future. Our vision Historically, the most advanced, state-of-the-art design tools have been prohibitively priced, with access being limited to engineers based within the few companies that could afford them. The Altium vision unchanged since the Company's inception is to break down these barriers to innovation and technological advancement and provide every engineer and system designer with easy access to the best possible design solutions. Our ultimate goal is to develop the complete electronics design system and ensure it is available to every professional engineer and designer. This is the driving force behind why our Company was founded and is still the vision that guides our strategies today and into the future. Nick Martin Founder and CEO of Altium Limited

3 Contents 1 The art of electronic product development Building the physical platform PCB design Integrating programmable devices with physical design Managing components and libraries Moving the design through to manufacture Harnessing the power of programmable devices Managing the entire development process Deploying Altium Designer with confidence Copyright 2005 Altium Limited. Altium, Altium Designer, Board Insight, CAMtastic, CircuitStudio, Design Explorer, DXP, LiveDesign, NanoBoard, NanoTalk, Nexar, nvisage, P-CAD, Protel, Situs, TASKING, and Topological Autorouting and their respective logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of Altium Limited or its subsidiaries. Actel is a registered trademark of Actel Corporation. Altera, Cyclone, Max and Stratix are registered trademarks of Altera Corporation. Xilinx, CoolRunner, Virtex and Spartan are registered trademarks of Xilinx Inc. OrCAD, OrCAD Capture, OrCAD layout, SPECCTRA and Verilog are registered trademarks of Cadence Design Systems, Inc and Windows and Visual SourceSafe are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. All other registered or unregistered trademarks referenced herein are the property of their respective owners, and no trademark rights to the same are claimed. Page 11 image courtesy of Thales from the Australian Navy Photography Unit. Page 50 image courtesy of Mattias Ericson, Omnisys Instruments.

4 1 The art of electronic product development

5 Developing the electronics of a product Creating an electronic product involves balancing a number of different processes that must come together to meet business objectives. Projects must be completed on time and within budget. As electronic products become more intelligent, designers must become 'smarter' in the way they develop products in order to meet business objectives. In a typical electronic product today, much of the 'intelligence' of the product is embodied in the embedded software running on a microprocessor and the functionality of the large-scale discrete components connected together on the board. While software is easily updateable, the discrete devices hard-wired on the PCB are essentially fixed once the physical platform is defined. Microprocessors created a revolution in electronics development because they allowed portions of the design problem to be moved into the highly fluid and easily updateable realm of software. Moving functionality into the 'soft' realm brings innumerable benefits to the design process. Critical design decisions can be made later, products can be brought to market earlier and then upgraded in the field, and functionality can be added to the product in software without adding to the overall product cost. The recent emergence of low-cost, high-capacity programmable devices such as FPGAs (Fieldprogrammable gate arrays) is redefining the boundaries between software and hardware, and leading to another shift in how designers think about adding intelligence to their products. These devices allow the intelligent portions of the design to encompass not only software in the traditional sense, but the soft-wired blocks of hardware implemented inside the FPGA. As more of the functionality of products is moved into the programmable domain, the three main design processes board design, programmable logic design and embedded software development become increasingly dependent on each other. As the design processes converge, the design systems that engineers rely on to develop products must also converge in order to maintain design efficiency into the future. 2

6 1 The art of electronic product development The physical electronics platform Building the physical platform of an electronic product consists of taking discrete components, wiring them together at the schematic level and processing the circuit to provide the connectivity and component information used to drive the layout and routing of a printed circuit board. The PCB design is then used to generate the files needed to fabricate and assemble the board, provide design documentation and link to the mechanical design of the casing and other mechanical parts of the product. With the increasing use of programmable devices such as FPGAs, board designers are being challenged to efficiently integrate these devices at the board level. Unlike discrete components, the pins on a programmable device do not have fixed functions. Indeed one of the features of modern FPGAs is the plethora of I/O characteristics that can be assigned to the physical pins of the device and the complete flexibility in setting the pin functionality. Keeping it synchronized While this flexibility has the potential to allow more design freedom, for example the pin assignments of the FPGA could be optimized to allow easier board routing, it also creates problems. Propagating I/O changes between PCB and FPGA designs manually creates real headaches for designers and can have a severe impact on schedules. As pin counts on FPGAs escalate, the problem of maintaining synchronization between programmable devices and the board they reside on is becoming a real barrier to successful design using these devices. It is impossible to ignore the penetration of programmable devices into mainstream design. Moving forward, it is essential that board-level design systems provide integration and synchronization with programmable logic design to allow engineers to fully harness the potential that such devices bring to the design arsenal. 3

7 The programmable elements of a design Conventional embedded design relies on code running on discrete microprocessors to provide a high degree of functionality and 'intelligence' to a design. The software can be easily changed and updated throughout the development cycle and can be debugged interactively on the target execution platform. Microcontrollers offer a range of in-built peripheral devices that can be used by designers, along with external discrete components, to create the system platform for the software. One of the drawbacks of this approach is that the physical execution platform must be designed and prototyped before the software development can be completed. Also, decisions about the specific microcontroller to target, the partitioning of functions between hardware and software and the selection of discrete peripherals must all be made early in the development of the product. Changing any of these physical attributes late in the design cycle can mean significant re-engineering work. Our customers Altium Designer is a feature-rich, flexible and intuitive design solution with no boundaries and a very powerful user interface. It has enabled us to integrate state-ofthe art technology into our electronic products, which has allowed ANCA to become a world leader in the CNC Tool and Cutter Grinder market. Ian Rees, Electronics Engineer ANCA Pty Ltd., Australia The changing role of FPGAs Programmable logic devices have traditionally been used as a container for the glue logic that binds the processor to peripheral devices and interface components that comprise the complete system. The recent emergence of large-capacity FPGAs at relatively low cost has the potential to change the way we think about programmable hardware, and to redefine the boundaries between hardware and software. They can be used to implement and consolidate the various peripheral functions needed by the processor system, or indeed to include the processor itself effectively creating a complete system platform with programmable hardware. This effectively makes the software execution platform as easy to change and update during development as the software that runs on it. Functionality can be moved from software into hardware, and vice versa. Peripheral devices can be added or taken away from the core processor to provide complete freedom in system definition. To harness this potential, the design of the software execution platform and the development of the embedded software must move beyond loose integration and become truly unified. Design systems must support the movement of peripherals and the processor itself into the programmable domain, and provide a flexible hardware-software co-design environment that intimately links FPGA design and software development. 4

8 1 The art of electronic product development The electronic product development process 5

9 Bringing unity to electronic design At its core, developing the electronics of a product essentially involves two levels of design. The first is creating a physical platform using discrete, off-the-shelf components mounted on a printed circuit board. The second involves the development of the programmable elements of a design that are 'loaded' onto the physical design during or after manufacture. Primarily these programmable elements consist of embedded software running on processing execution platforms within the design, and configurable hardware implemented in devices such as FPGAs. As more functionality moves from discrete devices and into the programmable realm, the various design processes involved are converging. As we move into the future, efficient electronic product development will require the integration of board design, programmable logic design and software development, and the bringing together of the design management processes that oversee them. Building the physical platform PCB design (p.12) Integrating programmable devices into the physical design (p.24) Managing components and libraries (p.30) Moving the design through to manufacture (p.36) Harnessing the power of programmable devices (p.42) Managing the entire development process (p.54) is the first unified electronic product development system that allows you to take a design from concept through to completion within a single integrated environment. 6

10 1 The art of electronic product development Altium Designer bringing unity to the design process Electronic product development is a rapidly changing playing field. The ready availability of high-capacity, low-cost programmable devices is opening up new ways of thinking about design, allowing more intelligent, lower-cost products to be designed within shorter development cycles. Traditionally, board-level design, FPGA design and software development have been treated as separate, independent processes each carried out in separate design environments. Moving into the future, this point tool approach will increasingly present a barrier to efficient electronic product development. At Altium we believe that the future should be available to every engineer, designer and developer, and this belief has driven us to create Altium Designer a unique and unified system for electronic product development with the future built in. Altium Designer provides a single, unified application that incorporates all the technologies and capabilities necessary for complete electronic product development. Altium Designer integrates board- and FPGA-level system design, embedded software development for FPGA-based and discrete processors, and PCB layout, editing and manufacturing within a single design environment. This, combined with modern design data management capabilities, makes Altium Designer the complete solution for electronic product development a solution that caters for both today's and tomorrow's development needs. Design at the board level In Altium Designer our proven strength in board-level system design has been integrated at the platform level with support for programmable design within an FPGA environment. This provides a complete and unified system that can be deployed across all elements of the electronic product design process. Altium Designer's board-level design capabilities are second to none, and allow you to fully define and implement all physical elements of your design. The system features hierarchical, multi-channel design capture, mixed-signal circuit simulation, pre-and post-layout signal integrity analysis, rules-driven board layout and editing, manual, interactive and next-generation Situs Topological Autorouting, complete CAM editing capabilities and an extensive range of integrated physical component libraries. With Altium Designer you can design the physical PCB platform, create the programmable system hardware and develop the embedded software that make up an electronic product, all within a single, unified design environment. 7

11 Design with programmable devices Altium Designer is unique in that it allows you to change the way you think about developing electronic products and fully exploit the potential offered by today's large-capacity programmable devices. By unifying FPGA design and software development and using the programmable fabric of an FPGA as a system platform, you can work within an easily updateable soft realm where you can change software and hardware with equal ease. Altium Designer allows you take advantage of the benefits to design efficiency and flexibility that this brings, while leveraging your existing hardware and software design skills. embedded software development capabilities and Altium Designer's integrated environment, you can effectively migrate system functionality from the board into programmable devices, allowing you to harness these devices as a reconfigurable system platform. What's more, with Altium Designer you are not locked in to specific target devices. The system is designed to be FPGA vendor-neutral and allows you to work with a wide range of target programmable devices from multiple FPGA vendors. This gives you the freedom to choose the best device for each application, and to easily move designs between different FPGA devices. >> Altium Designer provides you with extensive libraries of FPGA-based components, including a range of processors and peripherals that allow you to capture your system design for FPGA implementation at the schematic level. Using these components, the in-built Our customers Altium Designer provides many features for the design of state-of-the-art hi-fi audio apparatus. It has been evolving with ongoing development and offers us a state-of-the-art design environment. Our service department also uses Altium Designer to create manuals, since they can save time by using the schematics and PCB data directly from designers, which is great! Mark M. Suzuki, Director Engineering Dept. Accuphase Laboratory, Inc., Japan 8

12 1 The art of electronic product development Altium Designer bringing unity to the design process Complete electronic product development Creating more intelligent electronic products requires the convergence of different design processes. Traditionally hard-wired elements are increasingly moving into the soft-wired realm of programmable devices. The design of the hardware platform, the software and the software execution platform are, by necessity, becoming more closely linked. Altium Designer unifies the design of all these elements to create the most productive and complete electronic product development system available. With Altium Designer, you are working within a single, unified environment throughout the development process. You can effortlessly synchronize the schematic capture with the PCB layout, maintain I/O synchronization between FPGA designs and the boards they reside on, and automatically ensure consistency of memory and peripheral definition between the hardware and software elements of the design. This gives you unprecedented freedom to make design changes at any point in the design process and in any document within the project. Altium Designer will ensure that the changes are reflected in all relevant design documents in your project, ensuring complete design integrity. Unify your design with Altium Designer. The emergence of affordable high-capacity programmable devices allows you to move significant portions of your design off the hard-wired platform and into a 'soft' environment. This has the potential to save design time, simplify the board design and lower final manufacturing costs. Seeing is believing! Don't just read about the power of Altium Designer see it for yourself. Visit the DEMOcenter on the Altium website at to view on-demand video demonstrations that showcase Altium Designer in action. After all, seeing is believing! 9

13 At Altium we believe that the future should be available to every engineer, designer and developer, and this belief has driven us to create Altium Designer a unique and unified system for electronic product development with the future built in.

14 2 Building the physical platform PCB design

15 Integrate design capture, layout and verification The printed circuit board connects together the discrete components, connectors and other hardware that form the physical platform of the design. With increasing component densities, faster signal speeds and transitions, and tighter manufacturing tolerances, successful board design today, more than ever, relies on design systems Altium Designer unifies the process of board design by providing a single, integrated environment for capturing design data, verifying the performance of the circuit, and designing the PCB. All design data is managed under a single PCB project within Altium Designer, ensuring data integrity and eliminating the need to manually recreate or propagate design data between different applications. Altium Designer natively supports the integration of programmable devices into the physical platform by unifying the board and FPGA design processes. Altium Designer lets you achieve optimum board routing solutions with FPGA devices while automatically maintaining I/O synchronization. This saves design time, minimizes errors and potentially lowers manufacturing costs. Electronic products are increasing in functionality and design time is getting tighter. You simply can't afford to fight with loosely-connected point tools in order to complete a single project. With Altium Designer you can take a design from concept to completion within a single, unified, constraintsdriven design environment. Altium Designer provides the integration you need to meet today's and tomorrow's physical design challenges. that unify design definition and physical layout. 12

16 2 Building the physical platform PCB design Develop boards that are correct by design PCB design can be a minefield of conflicting requirements. High-speed logic, dense packaging technologies and large-scale programmable devices place extreme demands on the PCB designer. All physical design constraints, such as track clearances, path lengths and trace widths need to be carefully monitored and controlled to produce a successful board design. Altium Designer's powerful rules-driven design, layout and editing environment gives you full control over all aspects of the physical implementation of your circuit. The system helps you create boards that are correct by design, and ensures the integrity of design data and compliance with all design constraints at every stage of the design process from capture through to board production. With Altium Designer, we've placed the focus on the intelligent automation of critical design processes. Altium Designer peels away the design complexity and allows you to easily navigate and manipulate your design data. And the unified nature of Altium Designer provides seamless integration between the board design and all other aspects of the design process. Full constraints-driven design Being able to effectively define and apply physical constraints to the board layout is crucial to achieving high production yields. Altium Designer provides a comprehensive set of design rules that cover all aspects of the board design process. From electrical and routing constraints through to signal integrity, Altium Designer's hierarchical rules system provides the power and flexibility to completely control all crucial parameters in the design. Set up and management of rules is centralized, so you can define all your constraints quickly and efficiently. You can selectively enable or disable individual rules, and defined rules sets can be exported or imported, allowing you to propagate rule definitions between projects and save setup time. Rules can be defined during design capture and automatically propagated through to board layout. Altium Designer dynamically monitors crucial design rules, such as track width and clearance, as you route, actively preventing violations. This lets you concentrate on the routing task Altium Designer will take care of rule compliance and help you to produce error-free boards. Altium Designer's hierarchical rules system and query-based scoping allows you to rapidly and precisely define the physical constraints of your design. 13

17 Precise design rule scoping Instead of a set of fixed, pre-defined rule scopes, Altium Designer features a flexible query system to define the objects that a rule is applied to. This gives precise control over rule targeting, and makes the process of constraining your design fast and efficient. You can define multiple rules of the same type targeted to different sets of objects, providing hierarchical constraint definition. For example, you can set up rules to route a net at one width on the top layer, and a different width on the bottom layer or close the solder mask over the vias on the bottom layer, but not the top layer. With Altium Designer you won't have any problems knowing which rules are being applied to what. You can navigate through the defined rules and have Altium Designer highlight the objects targeted, or simply right-click on an object to find out exactly which rules are applicable to it. Our customers We have been using Protel for over 15 years and have observed Altium products grow in strength to their current high level of reliability and integration. Altium Designer s interactive routing features streamline our design process, while polygon pours and split planes help us create neat and efficient board layouts. Brian Sala Digital Device Development Group, Australia Maintaining the accuracy of source schematics PCB re-spins cost time and money, so finding design errors early is essential. Altium Designer introduces the concept of project compilation to the capture process to ensure the integrity and consistency of the source files within a project. At any time in the design process you can compile your schematic project. At each compilation the hierarchy and connectivity of the project is rebuilt and verified, and the project is checked for electrical and drafting errors. The project is automatically compiled before any critical design actions, such as invoking interactive project navigation or synchronizing the schematics with the PCB layout. In this way the system ensures that you are alerted to errors and potential design problems as you design. Altium Designer interactively highlights common problems, such as duplicate component designators, directly on the schematic as you work. This allows you to correct errors as they occur without interruption to your work flow. With Altium Designer you can capture your application with the confidence that your projects will be correct by design, and that the integrity of your source files is constantly maintained throughout the design process. >> 14

18 2 Building the physical platform PCB design Develop boards that are correct by design Complete design synchronization Design is not a simple linear process. Changes and updates are often made throughout the design cycle and it s easy for the final board layout to get out of step with the source schematics. This can lead to inadvertent errors in the design documentation or, even worse, incorrect manufacturing files. Altium Designer's unified environment supports full and automatic synchronization of your entire board project, and allows you to efficiently manage the flow of changes between the PCB design and the source schematics. Synchronization is bi-directional, so you can manage changes made at both the schematic and PCB level within a single operation. You have full control over the direction in which changes are propagated, and you can fully document any changes by generating engineering change order reports during synchronization. This gives you the freedom to make design updates at any stage during development, and the confidence that the integrity of your entire design project will be maintained from capture all the way through to manufacture. Navigating design data Altium Designer brings clarity to design navigation with a variety of innovative ways to filter, display and edit your design data. You can interactively browse through components, nets or violations within schematic or PCB documents, and drill down through the hierarchy to highlight the individual primitives associated with objects. As you browse, the graphical display dynamically zooms to the selected objects and 'dims' surrounding objects so you can easily focus on just the pieces of the design you are interested in. Altium Designer's innovative Board Insight system turns your cursor into an interactive data mining tool. As you hover the cursor within the PCB design, essential information is displayed about the underlying objects. When multiple objects are stacked, Board Insight presents you with a graphical list that lets you easily select or edit the properties of any particular object under the cursor position. Fully synchronized with the graphical schematic and PCB editors are spreadsheet-like list views of your design data. This provides an alternative editing view that allows you to sort and filter all objects in the design. The graphical and list views are dynamically linked to provide true alternative views of your design data. Altium Designer provides an extensive range of features that help you easily navigate design complexity. 15

19 Bring structure to the design process As designs become more complex, it is necessary to partition the design into easily-manageable, logical sections in order to effectively manage the capture process. The Altium Designer schematic editor facilitates the capture of designs of any complexity by supporting a hierarchical approach to design. This allows you to take both a top-down and bottom-up view of the overall circuit, and to easily break the design into functional blocks. There is no limit to the number of sheets that can be contained within a project, and the depth of hierarchy is unlimited. Altium Designer provides easy navigation of the hierarchical constructs within the schematic project. You can, for example, automatically synchronize the connection ports on sheet symbols with the schematic subsheets they represent. You can navigate connectivity up and down the hierarchy and trace a single connection through the entire design. Altium Designer's hierarchical environment and extensive design navigation support help you bring order to the capture process and facilitate a structured approach to design capture. Handling repeated circuit blocks Many designs include extensive blocks of repeated circuitry. Cutting and pasting circuit segments achieves the overall design structure, but makes editing difficult. You need to make repeated edits to change the circuit or channel structure. With Altium Designer you can handle repeated circuitry intelligently within the schematic hierarchy. You can reference a single subsheet multiple times by including a repeat parameter in the referencing sheet symbol. When you compile your project, Altium Designer will automatically instantiate the repeated blocks or channels programmatically. Because the hierarchy is maintained within the project throughout the capture process, you can edit the source schematic at any time and recompile to propagate the edits to all repeated blocks or change the number of repeated instances. As you move through to board design, Altium Designer will automatically propagate channel instantiation through to the PCB layout. This allows you to layout one channel and then copy the placement and routing across the remaining channels. Altium Designer's intelligent handling of multichannel designs minimizes unnecessary editing and maintains channel hierarchy and integrity throughout the design process, allowing you to efficiently construct repeated blocks of circuitry within a project. Taking a hierarchical approach to capture allows you to bring structure to even the most complex designs. With Altium Designer you can create designs of unlimited sheets and hierarchy depth, with full support for multiple channels and repeated blocks of circuitry. 16

20 2 Building the physical platform PCB design Layout and route the PCB As you move from capture through to board layout and routing, Altium Designer supports the propagation of the hierarchical structure of the project. The system preserves the functional partitioning of the design into the physical realm, and makes it easy to scope physical constraints to drive the layout and routing process. You can automatically generate component and net classes based on the schematic sheet hierarchy, which you can then use within the PCB editor to create targeted design rules. Schematic structure can also be used to drive the creation of component placement rooms, preserving the logical structure defined within the source files. Altium Designer's high level of integration between schematic capture and PCB design allows design intent to be preserved and propagated as you move from the conceptual to the physical phase of the board design. This smoothes the transition between capture and layout, and provides a truly unified design environment. Complete interactive routing system A large portion of the board design effort is spent on routing the connections. As board real estate shrinks and component and pin densities increase, the routing challenge becomes tougher. You need to be able to squeeze the most from every square millimeter of routing space. Altium Designer provides you with a complete interactive routing solution that combines rulesdriven, versatile interactive routing modes, predictive track placement and dynamically optimized connectivity to allow you to efficiently tackle any routing challenge. Begin routing a net from any starting point you're not constrained by the connection order and Altium Designer will automatically set the track width to conform with the specific design rule for that net. You can constrain routing to 90 /45 corners, allow routing at any angle, or route with rounded corners all these options are easily selectable as you route. As you near the end of a route, Altium Designer can automatically and intelligently complete the connection for you under complete design rule compliance. 17

21 Versatile routing modes In tight spots you can simply hug existing tracks and Altium Designer will enforce the defined clearance constraints, preventing you from creating rule violations. Or switch modes and Altium Designer will push existing tracks out of the way, under full design rule compliance, to make room. To reroute a track simply route the new path and Altium Designer will automatically remove redundant copper, making design rework fast and efficient. Automatic loop removal is controllable at an individual net level, allowing you to disable the feature for particular connections. To support routing to large BGA devices, Altium Designer includes an automatic BGA escape routing function that will fanout and place stub tracks on all used pins of the device to make connection paths accessible around the periphery of the component. This eliminates the time-consuming task of hand routing through dense BGA components. The mix of interactive routing features in Altium Designer provides a complete and unified interactive routing environment that allows you to quickly and efficiently tackle any board routing challenge. Full adherence to design rules at every stage of the routing supports the constraintsdriven design process to allow you to produce boards that are correct by design. Autorouting support Altium Designer comes equipped with Altium's Situs Topological Autorouter engine, which is fully integrated into the PCB editor. The Situs engine uses topological analysis to map the board space. Topological mapping provides greater flexibility in route path determination and allows non-orthogonal routing corridors to be more efficiently exploited. Because the autorouter is a unified part of the PCB design editor, you can run it at any time to route the whole board, a single net or component, or anything in between. The full power of the autorouting engine is always at your fingertips. Altium Designer also includes full bi-directional support for the SPECCTRA autorouter. During export you can automatically preserve existing board routing, control the mapping of Altium Designer via rules to SPECCTRA pad stacks, and propagate net classes to SPECCTRA to allow efficient generation of class-based routing constraints. Our customers Altium Designer is a very valuable tool that helps us through every phase of electronic product development. When designing complex space systems you have to be sure that the design software is up for the task. Altium Designer and Altium's NanoBoard allow us to quickly implement soft processors in FPGAs that can withstand the harsh environment space electronics is exposed to. Mattias Ericson, Engineer Omnisys Instruments, Sweden 18

22 2 Building the physical platform PCB design Design high-speed circuitry Increasing clock speeds and fast serial interconnections are bringing high-speed design considerations into mainstream board development. High-speed signal propagation places particular demands on the physical design. Altium Designer supports high-speed design with targeted design rules, complete system-level support for managing differential signals, and integrated signal integrity analysis. Altium Designer's extensive rules system allows you to create constraints targeted towards high-speed design and differential signaling. For example, you can set the maximum allowable length of nets, control the number of vias in a net and match the lengths of defined nets, automatically adding accordion segments to traces as required. You can also specify the maximum allowable parallel run of traces to avoid crosstalk between nets, and fullyconstrain the physical layout of differential signal pairs on your board. Working with differential signals Differential signaling is increasingly used in mainstream board design. This is particularly true for designs that use programmable devices. FPGA vendors are including extensive LVDS capabilities in even their lower-cost device ranges. LVDS is gaining popularity because it not only improves reflection noise, but also electromagnetic interference (EMI) and power consumption. Altium Designer provides system-wide support for differential signaling, and lets you take full advantage of the LVDS capabilities offered by today's FPGAs. You can define differential signal pairs at the schematic or PCB level Altium Designer will propagate and synchronize the definitions throughout the project. With linked FPGA and PCB projects, Altium Designer automatically maps a differential signal defined within the FPGA project to appropriate signal pairs in the physical design. Altium Designer's PCB editor includes interactive routing support for differential signals, allowing you to simultaneously route both nets of a pair under full design rule compliance. This provides integrated and system-wide support for differential signals from FPGA design right through to PCB layout. Altium Designer includes system-wide support for differential signaling, allowing you to map LVDS I/O from FPGA projects through to the physical design or define differential pairs on the board schematics or PCB layout. You can also interactively route both nets in pair simultaneously under full design rule compliance. 19

23 Managing signal integrity issues The fast edge transitions on modern logic families are making signal integrity analysis a crucial part of the physical design process. FPGAs in particular can present significant problems. The wide range of programmable I/O characteristics available on these devices complicates the process of correctly terminating signal lines to prevent excessive reflections. With Altium Designer you can perform signal integrity analysis at the capture stage, as well as during board layout. This allows you to identify potential problem areas, determine the correct termination strategy and add the necessary components to the design before moving to PCB layout. With programmable devices, analysis is automatically performed using the programmed I/O characteristics of the device. This allows you to easily determine the affect that modifying parameters such as slew rate will have on circuit performance. An integrated termination advisor lets you see the effect of different termination networks on signal integrity without the need to directly alter the circuit. You can then sweep termination component values to determine the optimum solution for each connection node. Full impedance, signal reflection and crosstalk analysis can be run on your final board to check the real-world performance of your design after layout is complete. Signal integrity screening is built into the Altium Designer design rules system, allowing you to check for potential signal integrity violations as part of the normal board DRC process. Our customers Altium Designer is much easier to use than competing software, and I can t think of any other company that is anywhere close to Altium in support. The fact that Altium Designer has such an active user community and Altium engineers monitor and respond to the forums is great. Altium tools are the perfect solution for PCB designers making the transition to FPGA design. Dan Bay, President Bay Enterprises, USA Altium Designer s signal integrity simulator allows you to compare proposed termination options and optimize signal quality. 20

24 2 Building the physical platform PCB design Perform mixed-signal circuit simulation Functional circuit simulation is a useful tool in investigating aspects of circuit performance during development. With Altium Designer you don't need to move to a separate environment in order to make use of simulation in your design flows. Mixed-signal circuit simulation is a unified part of the capture process, and is fully-integrated with the schematic editing environment. The Altium Designer simulation engine supports both standard SPICE 3f5/XSPICE and PSpice models, giving you the widest possible choice of component simulation options. Altium Designer provides a full array of simulation analyses, including advanced temperature and parameter sweeping, Monte Carlo component tolerance sweeps, pole-zero analysis and noise analysis. Simulation results are displayed in the integrated waveform viewer, which gives you a detailed and accurate picture of circuit performance. You can perform mathematical post-processing of simulation results, overlay waveforms, display different simulation types on a single graph and export the waveform data. Seeing is believing! As you read through this brochure you'll learn about the numerous ways that Altium Designer can increase the productivity of your design team. Well don't just read about it! See Altium Designer in action for yourself. Visit the DEMOcenter on the Altium website at to view on-demand video demonstrations that showcase Altium Designer in action. After all, seeing is believing! Altium Designer integrates mixed-signal circuit simulation into the design capture environment, and provides a powerful waveform viewer that lets you fully analyze the generated simulation data. 21

25 With Altium Designer you can take a design from concept to completion within a single, unified, constraints-driven design environment. Altium Designer provides the integration you need to meet today's and tomorrow's physical design challenges.

26 3 Integrating programmable devices with physical design

27 Linking FPGAs with board-level design Large scale programmable devices are increasingly finding their way into mainstream electronic product development. They bring significant benefits to the design process, allowing functional complexity to be moved from hard-wired devices into the programmable realm. Today it is crucial The extensive use of FPGAs within a system design has some compelling benefits, not the least of which is rapid development cycles. But time saved in the development of the FPGA circuitry does not automatically translate to faster time to market for the end product. One of the features of FPGAs is that the pin definition of the devices is configurable. As well as defining the function of each pin, you can select from a wide range of electrical I/O characteristics. While this provides immense design freedom, it also complicates the process of incorporating these devices onto a PCB. This can negate much of the time saved in the FPGA development stage. Altium Designer solves the problems of working with large-scale programmable devices by providing seamless linking of FPGA design projects with the board design that incorporates them. This allows you to gain the full benefits that programmable devices have to offer, and opens the door to a new way of approaching electronic product development. for design productivity that these devices be seamlessly integrated into the physical design process. 24

28 3 Integrating programmable devices with physical design Concurrent FPGA and PCB design Altium Designer provides a unified environment for the design of both the internal configuration of programmable devices and the PCB platform that they reside on. This facilitates complete FPGA-PCB co-design and enables rapid development of FPGAbased applications. Because the projects are linked at the design level, you can begin the physical design process using a default FPGA configuration while the FPGA is still in development. As FPGA development progresses, updated pin and I/O assignments can be transferred to the board design project. The physical schematic representation of the FPGA device is automatically updated to reflect the updated I/O definitions, keeping existing connectivity intact. These changes can then be flowed on to the PCB. FPGA configurations within a single FPGA project. For example, you can have one configuration targeting your FPGA development environment and another for your production board design. This lets you seamlessly move between development or production builds of the FPGA and further facilitates concurrent design of the FPGA and the physical platform. Altium Designer abstracts FPGA design from the physical constraints used to drive the FPGA place and route process. This allows you to maintain multiple Our customers At 20th Century Fox, Post Production Services, there are frequent job distractions interrupting the progress of engineering projects. Altium Designer allows me to stop at any point in the design cycle and rapidly pick up where I left off, without losing time constantly reviewing my work. This, and the autorouting speed, enable us to use prototype PCBs rather than relying on tedious hand wiring. Paul Pavelka, Sound Engineer 20th Century Fox, Post Production Services, USA Altium Designer allows you to structurally link FPGA and PCB design projects. This allows you to concurrently design the FPGA logic and the board on which the FPGA resides. Altium Designer will automatically synchronize the designs to ensure the projects stay in step. 25

29 Managing I/O synchronization Programmable devices such as FPGAs bring particular challenges to the board design process. Typically these devices have a large number of pins whose I/O characteristics and functions are not fixed, but determined by the application programmed into them. Traditionally crucial I/O pins will be fixed by the FPGA designer, with the FPGA place and route tools free to assign the remaining pins as necessary. The result at the board level is a pin configuration that is generally far from optimal for PCB routing, and the task of propagating I/O characteristics for processes such as signal integrity analysis becomes time consuming and error prone. Because Altium Designer unifies the process of FPGA and PCB design, it fully supports I/O synchronization between the PCB and FPGA projects. This allows you to forward and back annotate pin assignment changes and automatically propagate I/O characteristics for signal integrity simulation and differential pair management. Achieve optimal routing solutions with FPGAs As you deploy FPGAs within the PCB layout, you can define sets of pins that can be interchanged at the board level. From within the PCB design you can manually swap pins to improve routing, or let Altium Designer automatically optimize the connection lines for easier board routing. With a few mouse clicks you can then propagate pin changes back to the FPGA project, and rerun the FPGA place and route process with the new constraints. This allows you to rapidly iterate through PCB and FPGA routing options to arrive at an optimal system-level design solution. The unification of the programmable and physical elements of an electronic product within Altium Designer allows you to take full advantage of the benefits that large capacity FPGAs offer. Altium Designer allows you to effectively manage the complexity FPGAs introduce at the board level, and removes the barriers to their widespread adoption within mainstream design. Altium Designer allows you to optimize connections on an FPGA device at the board level to facilitate PCB routing, with pin changes automatically propagated back to the board schematics and FPGA project. This can significantly reduce routing lengths and crossovers, and result in better utilization of board real estate, lower production costs and shorter design cycles. 26

30 3 Integrating programmable devices with physical design Debug JTAG devices at the physical level Many of today's high-density FPGA devices come in gridded packaging such as BGAs. It is often extremely difficult or impossible to physically probe pins on these devices to determine signal status during system development. This can make physical debugging of the circuit a difficult challenge. Altium Designer leverages the JTAG capabilities of FPGAs to allow you to dynamically investigate the status of any pins on the device without the need for physical access to the pins. JTAG boundary scan allows for transparent monitoring of the signal status on the device. When your Altium Designer system is connected to a suitable development board, such as Altium's device-independent NanoBoard, or your JTAG-equipped prototype or production board, the in-built, real-time JTAG Viewer allows you to easily view the state of all the pins on any JTAG supported component. This forms part of Altium Designer's interactive FPGA development methodology LiveDesign. The JTAG Viewer presents you with a footprint and symbol view of the target device. You can manually capture a snapshot of the pin status of the device, or have the display update dynamically as the circuit operates. You can hide the display of unused pins, and select any single or group of nets within your design to focus on. This allows you to easily monitor the status of just the pins you are interested in. Pin status can also be dynamically reflected and displayed on the source schematics for your project and the PCB layout. This allows you to easily trace signals throughout the entire design. With Altium Designer, you can monitor the status of critical lines in real-time as you exercise the circuit to determine correct state changes, and easily see problems such as stuck signal lines. This ability to easily view the status of the physical pins of an FPGA, or indeed any JTAG device supported by the system, provides a valuable aid in debugging your design at the physical level when working with high pin-count JTAG-enabled devices such as FPGAs. Altium Designer s enhanced JTAG Viewer gives you a real-time view of the pin status of JTAG devices such as FPGAs while your circuit is running, allowing you to debug system hardware without the need to physically probe devices. 27