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Chip Designers Face New Challenges
December 10, 2004 |Estimated reading time: 2 minutes
San Jose, Calif. — Much of the information presented at the Mentor Graphics' Editors and Analysts Day, centered on chip design. Chip designers are facing interesting challenges at the 90-nm node, including ensuring that their designs can be manufactured and how to verify that a design that can be manufactured actually functions as it is supposed to. The details of how all this is done, however, are not necessarily understandable or applicable to those who work at the packaging or board level.
Although PCB design is not a growth area, Mentor is pursuing some new avenues that affect PCB design. Henry Potts, VP and GM of the Systems Design Division, presented growth opportunities in the areas of chip/board co-design, embedded passives, flexible circuits and global collaboration. John Isaac, director of Systems Market Development, discussed these areas with SMT in more detail.
Advances in field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) have produced programmable chips with significant system functionality, containing 10M gates and requiring 1500 pins. Several of these FPGAs may be placed on one board, creating challenges in routing. Mentor's approach is to couple design of the chip and the board, with software that the FPGA and PCB designer can use simultaneously to make changes in the pin-out and board traces and reach an optimum design together. Improvements may include, for example, reducing the required length of matched impedance traces for differential pairs.
Embedded passives are becoming more prevalent, and optimum design depends not on merely space considerations, but on materials selection. Using the smallest possible resistors throughout a board could require 20 different resistor materials, not a practical solution for manufacturing. Mentor employs fully automated embedded passives design that balances size, material and electrical constraints.
Flexible circuits are another growth area, driven by the digital camera and cell phone markets as well as medical applications. The issue in design, according to Isaac, is not having software capable of routing the curved traces, but having automated software that can streamline the process and accommodate time-to-market requirements.
Future directions for Mentor's Systems Design Division focus not on new technology, but on a data management system (DMS) to address the needs of global design teams to collaborate on component and board design. One server can link RF, analog and board designers around the world, giving them access to system-level constraints and reducing cost and cycle times. Potts noted that a large PCB customer deployed a DMS this year after a two-year development effort. Isaac explained that further development in the areas of IP protection and library management is needed for widespread adoption of DMS.
— Julia Goldstein