CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive

3 February 2009

Product News

Mentor Graphics Delivers Power Integrity Analysis to Address Advanced PCB Systems Design Challenges

Mentor Graphics Corporation announced delivery of its HyperLynx® PI (power integrity) product addressing the needs of the advanced designers of high performance electronic products. The HyperLynx PI product provides easy-to-learn-and-use setup and accurate analysis of today’s power plane structures enabling teams to design working power delivery systems while reducing design cycle times, prototypes, and manufacturing re-spins, as well as product cost.

With today’s high performance/density/pin-count ICs, power delivery systems design requires tight collaboration between the engineer and layout designer to ensure that clean, sufficient power is delivered to the ICs through multiple PCB power and ground structures. Coupled with the HyperLynx product suite for signal integrity (SI) analysis and verification, Mentor is now providing users with a comprehensive and useable solution for high-performance electronic product design.

“We have advanced users today that are required to design over 30 power delivery structures into a single PCB, driven by the multiple voltage levels and power requirements of their high-performance ICs,” said Henry Potts, vice president and general manager of Mentor Graphics Systems Design Division. “The design of these structures requires quick and accurate analysis of both DC power drop and power noise. With accurate analysis, the power and ground plane structures and de-coupling capacitor number, as well as placements, can be determined, thus avoiding over-conservative design and higher product cost.”

“It’s hard to escape power integrity design issues in today’s electronic products,” stated Dr. Eric Bogatin, president of Bogatin Enterprises, a world-leading provider of signal and power integrity training. “They either push the envelope in performance or can’t afford the added cost of over-design margin. With the huge range of noise tolerances, impedance targets, and split plane issues, every product’s PDN (power distribution network) is custom. HyperLynx PI can help an engineer create cost-effective design rules for the power delivery network and answer the important ‘what if?’ design questions early in the design cycle, bypassing the expensive build-it and test-it route. You can’t beat the combination of accuracy, ease-of-use, and transparent integration with the rest of the PCB design flow Mentor has built into HyperLynx PI. With these capabilities, engineers can now take the quickest route to market with the most cost-effective or highest performing products, and avoid expensive and time-consuming prototypes and re-spins.”

The drive to lower power in today’s products has led to high performance ICs using multiple voltage levels — some very low. With lower voltages, the DC power and noise margins are very small. This creates the need for multiple power delivery structures on a PCB and the need for that power to be exceptionally clean. The first issue is defining the power and ground split-planes to avoid excessive current densities and DC voltage drop. The HyperLynx PI product provides both pre- and post-layout analysis of irregular power and ground plane structures incorporating the exact IC pin locations and models. The results of the analysis can be both visual and textual, enabling the designer to quickly identify and resolve power and/or ground plane structure problems.

The second issue is the integrity, or absence of noise of the delivered power. The designer needs to determine the number and location of decoupling capacitors and the goal is to save component cost and board area by avoiding over-conservative (excessive) use of bypass capacitors. The designer may also want to experiment with the PCB fabrication materials and stack-up to determine the best electrical and cost solution. The HyperLynx PI product provides accurate analysis of the power integrity, enabling the designer to determine the best number, placement and values of the de-coupling capacitors. With this information, the designer can perform correct-by-design layout of the power structures and decoupling-capacitor placements for single-pass power integrity design.

The HyperLynx PI product is tightly integrated with the HyperLynx SI (signal integrity) product suite to provide a comprehensive analysis and verification solution for today’s high performance products. The HyperLynx SI product includes complete signal integrity and delay analysis functionality for classical parallel (synchronous), advanced-memory (DDR, DDR2, DDR3 - source-synchronous), and SERDES serial (asynchronous) bus interconnects. With the HyperLynx products, engineers and designers can optimize the performance of their advanced design while avoiding the need for costly prototypes and manufacturing re-spins.

Availability

The HyperLynx PI product is available now to select customers with pricing starting at $35K with general release targeted for first quarter 2009. It integrates with Mentor’s Expedition™ Enterprise, PADS® and Board Station® flows, as well as third party PCB design solutions such as Allegro and CR 5000. For more information and a power integrity technology white paper, go to: http://www.mentor.com/hyperlynx

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