Industry Summary Articles

Cadence Design Systems, Inc. today announced Cadence® Allegro® Pulse, the PCB industry's first solution to enable extended team collaboration by providing near-real-time insights into the complexities of the electronic design process. Allegro Pulse connects management, engineering, procurement and other business stakeholders to up-to-date work-in-progress design data in a single, unified web-based platform, enabling design teams to identify critical issues sooner, better evaluate readiness and predict and mitigate risk. As a result, companies can significantly reduce end-product cost, shorten design cycles, enable IP reuse and avoid costly fixes later in the design cycle. For more information, visit www.cadence.com/go/allegropulse.

Faster time-to-market demands have placed tremendous pressure upon today's electronic design process. Multiple business stakeholders require up-to-date insights into work in progress to ensure the success of customer projects, yet gathering and analyzing these insights about a design project can be a very tedious manual process. Traditional approaches often deliver insights too late in the design cycle, when companies are forced to make an undesirable tradeoff between schedule and lower costs. If the extended team could manage the parts list earlier in the design cycle, companies could achieve significant savings by reducing end-product cost.   

Allegro Pulse addresses these challenges, enabling customers to gather near-real-time metrics automatically and directly from the design database. Multiple stakeholders ranging from executives optimizing the business to engineers creating the innovation now have true engineering decision support. Allegro Pulse provides executives and business owners self-service dashboards that offer visibility into technical domains, a capability previously only afforded by CRM and ERP business intelligence solutions. Prebuilt, custom analytics allow real-time understanding of supply-chain spend, product schedule risks and resource allocation. Customizable views enable at-a-glance interpretation, putting the most important metrics at executives' fingertips.

Decision makers and innovators across the organization now have detailed visibility into more than 50 standard out-of-the-box project metrics, as well as custom metrics. With its web-based collaboration and analytics environment, Allegro Pulse enables customers to optimize parts lists across multiple designs, whether they are in the same end product, or across multiple projects or products in a business unit. Users can verify, monitor and compare parts assigned to projects with strategic parts lists and bills of materials, and pre-assign parts to projects using the tool's strategic parts list functionality. As a result, the extended team is aware of selected parts early in the design cycle, which significantly reduces end product costs for multiple products.

In addition, Allegro Pulse allows customers to collect all documents, discussions, issues and other project-related IP in a single, searchable reusable IP store, potentially saving 70 percent of the time previously spent using traditional methods such as daily or weekly status reports, online meetings and design reviews.

"Through a single, unified browser, Allegro Pulse provides extended team members from different business functions with access to accurate, up-to-date data on all projects in progress," said David Heafey, director, engineering applications at Mercury Systems. "With Allegro Pulse, we can retire our manual process for data collection and report generation while reducing end-product cost and improving the likelihood of first-pass success."

"Cadence is committed to enabling our customers to bring high-quality systems to market faster," said Tom Beckley, senior vice president and general manager, Custom IC & PCB Group at Cadence. "With Allegro Pulse, we've achieved another PCB industry first by enabling extended product teams to perform work-in-progress team collaboration. Our customers can now gain visibility into designs within a business unit, across a business unit, or across an entire company, enabling shorter, more predictable design cycles and lower end-product costs."

To view the original press release, please click here.

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