Cadence PCB Best Practices

Electrical and Mechanical Design Incremental Data Exchange

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Electrical Design, Mechanical Design Incremental Data Exchange in Allegro PCB Editor October 2019 5 Product Version 17.4-2019 © 1999-2019 All Rights Reserved. Electrical Design, Mechanical Design Incremental Data Exchange (IDX) Introduction The exchange of electrical and mechanical CAD data has had many import-export formats, such as, DXF, and IDF. Each format has maintained a set of standards accepted by the CAD industry. These formats have served well over the years, with one common underlying issue, the exchange of data is considered, "all or nothing". If a board outline, constraint areas, and component placement is used initially, all the same data is continually exchanged bidirectionally, even if just one object is modified. This exchange format makes it difficult to manage design impact and track changes. The EDMD schema, a new XML based data exchange format, was created to aid in the exchange of ECAD-MCAD data by introducing the concept of passing incremental changes. This implies that both the ECAD and MCAD tools begin at the same starting point, or baseline, and any change from the baseline line is considered an incremental modification of the data. The incremental data is then passed from one CAD tool to the other, not the entire CAD interface data set. Additional capabilities in the EDMD schema — commonly referred to as Incremental Data Exchange (IDX) format — enhances the ability of design collaboration. The options provided in the EDMD schema, such as ability to add comments, and accept or reject modifications, improve communication between the two design disciplines. For example, after the design is baselined, the PCB Designer may wish to move a component whose location was defined in the baseline, the designer would export this change, and through a GUI, add a comment describing the reason for the modification. The Mechanical Designer would preview the incremental data, accept the change and import the data, or reject the change, and reply with a comment explaining the reason for rejection, along with a possible new location. The PCB Designer previews the new proposal, accepts, rejects, and so on. Note: The EDMD schema is managed by ProSTEP iViP ECAD/MCAD Implementation Collaboration Project Group (http://www.prostep.org). Cadence Design Systems is a member of this project group and continues to review and recommend updates and modifications to this standard to address technology and design process requirements. The IDX import/export is available in the SPB 16.5 release and beyond, in the XL and GXL suite of tools. By default, the SPB 16.5 release supports IDX version 2.0. IDX 1.2 is also

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