Industry Summary Articles

EMA Design Automation® has just released PCB Clustering™ for OrCAD®. “As designs become more complex and project timelines more compressed, it’s important to identify opportunities to enhance design processes,” said Manny Marcano, president and CEO of EMA. “PCB Clustering for OrCAD provides AutoClustering technology, intelligent design (IP) reuse, and replication technology that can significantly reduce board placement time.”

PCB Clustering for OrCAD resides directly in the OrCAD PCB Editor canvas. Related components are typically grouped together in the schematic. PCB Clustering can leverage this information to auto-generate tiled placement clusters. These clusters can be based on hierarchy, pages, reference designator prefixes/suffixes and/or ROOM properties defined in the schematic. This allows designers to get a quick logical grouping in the physical realm, enabling faster placement.

Once you have defined your clusters, PCB Clustering can automatically replicate that configuration using its matching algorithm by finding other like circuits in the design. This innovative bottom-up approach allows for partial match configurations and works regardless of component orientation. Clusters can be saved for reuse as a template that contains net topology, placement information, and etch. Templates can be referenced and used in current and subsequent designs. Creating a library of templates allows the design team to raise their level of abstraction by focusing on placement by template (group of components) as opposed to one part at a time.

“PCB Clustering for OrCAD adds scalability to the core OrCAD toolset,” added Marcano. “Scalability options allow different companies and industries to manage their costs versus their time-to-market challenges, and in this way we are responding to our customers’ dynamic and demanding needs.”

To view the original press release, please click here.

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