Mentor Graphics Corporation today announced its newest offering and key building block in the Xpedition® platform, the Xpedition Systems Designer product for multi-board systems connectivity. The Xpedition Systems Designer product captures the hardware description of multi-board systems, from logical system definition down to the individual PCBs, automating multi-level system design synchronization processes to ensure team collaboration with accuracy and faster design productivity.
Current systems design processes for advanced electronics are fraught with multiple, disconnected tools used for system definition, with no standard methodology to synchronize and transfer design data between design disciplines and abstraction levels. This results in incorrect electrical connections, mechanical interference, and the high costs of manual synchronization. The Xpedition Systems Designer product resolves this problem as the industry’s only single, integrated, and automated methodology that captures complete logic system definitions. The system may consist of multiple boards, cables and other system elements, such as backplane, cable assemblies, sensors and actuators. This solution enables consistency and completeness of the multi-board system description.
“Systems design involves collaboration across disciplines, and is critical to modern product development. Traditional design practices isolate systems capture from the rest of the process, lowering team productivity, stifling innovation, and increasing product cost,” stated John MacKrell, vice president, Systems Engineering Knowledge Council lead of CIMdata. “Mentor Graphics’ new systems design technology enables engineering teams to capture system designs, while collaborating effectively with all those involved in the design and implementation process to optimize the end product.”
The Industry’s Only “Common Cockpit” for System-wide Design Connectivity
The Xpedition Systems Designer product replaces time- and resource-consuming manual processes and the redundant re-entry of data with automatic synchronization of design changes across multiple levels and disciplines. This unique design “cockpit” enables system-wide partitioning of logical system blocks into individual PCBs. The environment fully supports concurrent design, enabling team members to simultaneously engineer and collaborate on different components of the system.
“Our new Xpedition platform delivers ‘industry-first’ technologies and our new Systems Designer product is a clear example,” stated Henry Potts, vice president and general manager of Mentor Graphics Systems Design Division. “Xpedition Systems Designer was developed as the industry’s best environment for design connectivity and team collaboration to deliver consistency of design integrity across disparate domains, tools and individuals.”
Xpedition Systems Designer - Key Features and Benefits
The Xpedition Systems Designer product provides a broad range of capabilities to ensure accurate, concurrent, and reliable systems design connectivity via automated processes. Here is a list of added functionality to optimize systems design efficiency:
- Single cockpit for logical system definition: System-level blocks and intra-board connectivity are defined within a common environment. System architectures created in Visio can by imported to accelerate system capture. Advanced synchronization work-in-progress design data enables multiple engineers to concurrently collaborate on the logical system level, as well as within the lower-level PCB projects.
- Simplified system-wide partitioning: A system can be easily partitioned into multiple board projects and associated connectivity. Automated connectivity synchronizes changes across the system, enabling ‘what-if’ re-partitioning exercises to optimize the system for performance, size and cost.
- Correct-by-design connector management: The effort to add, manipulate and update connectors is simplified with on-the-fly creation of parameterized connectors. Automated connector mating and pin pairing, as well as synchronization between PCB projects and system design data, eliminates connector errors throughout the design cycle.
- Automated connectivity definition and verification: Definition of connections between system elements including connection order and wiring of multiple nets and wires is highly automated. Signals can be traced across the entire system to ensure that the connectivity is as specified.
