Industry Summary Articles

Mentor, a Siemens business, today announced a new e-commerce offering of its market-leading HyperLynx® design rule check (DRC) tool. To mitigate the pressure from adhering to layout guidelines from IC vendors and standard bus technologies while meeting EMI/EMC, safety and corporate routing standards, Mentor is offering a free version of the HyperLynx DRC tool, which includes eight design rules, at no cost to any PCB designer or hardware engineer.

Design rule checking helps determine if the physical layout of a PCB or chip meets the minimum physical spacing and electrical requirements to reduce the likelihood of manufacturing or signal integrity (SI) or power integrity (PI) or EMI/EMC issues. Using built-in rules that can be parameterized, the user has immediate access to design verification technologies that are prevalent in the PCB design industry, without barriers to tool adoption.

“Interconnects are no longer transparent in high-speed digital and mixed-signal products, and even in many of the simplest IoT boards. If designers do not pay attention to design rules for signal integrity, power integrity and EMC, chances are the board is not going to work the first time. Of all the problems to watch out for, avoiding signals passing over a gap in their return plane alone accounts for most of the EMC and crosstalk problems even in ’low speed’ designs. Having confidence you don’t have this problem in your next board will increase your chance of first-pass success,” stated Eric Bogatin, dean of Signal Integrity Academy. “I am encouraged to see Mentor addressing these challenges head-on by delivering its core DRC solution free of charge to ensure that the general engineering community can begin to tackle these issues.”

Every PCB design, regardless of signal speed or frequency, should be evaluated for SI, PI, EMI/EMC and safety issues prior to fabrication to prevent costly design re-spins. By providing HyperLynx DRC with eight design rules free of charge (such as impedance and differential pairs), Mentor enables the hardware engineering and PCB design community to go beyond manual checking and the limited spacing-measurement rules built into PCB layout tools and immediately reap the benefits of advanced design and electrical rule verification technology.

The HyperLynx DRC tool increases a firm’s competitive advantage, eliminates process bottlenecks, and reduces a design’s time to market by enabling users of all experience levels to run the parameterized DRCs iteratively during the PCB design cycle. This increases the likelihood of getting the design right the first time during simulation or prototyping. Because rule parameterization can be saved, the know-how of experienced PCB designers, hardware engineers, and SI/PI experts can be retained and used, even when they are not available.

HyperLynx technology provides fast and accurate design analysis in a single, unified environment for design optimization. With eight DRC rules, the HyperLynx DRC free version lets users accelerate their design’s electrical signoff by conducting automated checks for electromagnetic interference (EMI), electromagnetic compatibility (EMC), signal integrity and power integrity to ensure design success. The HyperLynx DRC tool can be used as a standalone product or within any Mentor PCB from vendors such as Cadence, Zuken or Altium. PCB layout data can also be imported using industry-standard ODB++ or IPC-2581 formats.

For individuals or organizations that require additional rules for advanced design projects or for greater coverage of potential design violations, such as crosstalk coupling and multiple vias, Mentor is offering a powerful set of 22 rules for subscription at low cost. A three-month subscription of the HyperLynx DRC “Gold Edition” product with 22 rules is available for $299 (USD) and an annual (12-month) subscription option is available for $995 (USD). Users with specialized needs can consult a Mentor representative who can help customize a rule-set or a design ecosystem, such as rules from FPGA or IC vendors, to accelerate their designs for implementation on specific vendor devices.

“With this announcement, engineers and PCB designers worldwide can take advantage of our HyperLynx DRC tool and develop higher-quality products. We believe open access to these rules represents a major advancement in PCB design productivity throughout the industry,” said AJ Incorvaia, vice president and general manager, Mentor Board Systems Division.  “We want to ensure that every PCB design is verified for optimum performance. Although there is no obligation to do so, we believe users will choose to upgrade to the more powerful version of HyperLynx once they experience what it can do for them.”

To view the original press release, please click here.

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