Issue link: https://resources.pcb.cadence.com/i/1310866
www.cadence.com 3 Allegro PCB Design Solution engineers when debugging a board in the lab, or for assembly/test engineers on the manufacturing floor. Flipboard is not just limited to viewing; design edits can also be performed while in this mode. Interactive Etch Editing The routing feature of the PCB Editor provides powerful, interactive capabili- ties that deliver controlled automation to maintain user control, while maximizing routing productivity. Real-time, shape- based, any-angle, push/shove routing enables users to choose from "shove- preferred," "hug-preferred," or "hug- only" modes. During etch editing, the designer can view a real-time, graphical heads-up display of how much timing slack remains for inter- connect that has high-speed constraints. Interactive routing also enables group routing on multiple nets and interactive tuning of nets with high-speed length or delay constraints. Multi-Line Routing Multi-line routing allows users to quickly route multiple lines as a group on the PCB. Coupled with "hug-contour" option, this utility can help designers route multiple lines on the flex portion of the rigid-flex design in minutes instead of hours with traditional one trace at a time. Hug-contour option takes care of insert- ing traces with curves that are aligned to contour of the flex portion of the design. (See Figure 4.) Design Planning Option Highly constrained, high-density designs dominated by bussed interconnect can take significant time to strategically plan and route. Compound this with the density issues of today's components, new signaling levels, and specific topol- ogy requirements—and it's no wonder that traditional CAD tools and technolo- gies fall short of capturing a designer's specific routing intent and acting upon it. The Allegro PCB Designer Design Planning Option provides the technology and methodology to capture as well as adhere to a designer's intent. Through the inter- connect flow planning architecture and the global route engine, users can for the first time put their experience and design intent into a tool that understands what they want—natively. Users create abstracted interconnect data (through the interconnect flow planning architecture) and can quickly converge on a solution and validate it with the global route engine. The interconnect abstrac- tion reduces the number of elements the system has to deal with—from potentially tens of thousands down to hundreds— resulting in a significant reduction in the manual interaction required. Using the abstracted data, the planning and routing process can be accelerated by providing a visual/spatial map of the open area in relation to the data and the user's design intent. The route engine can then deal with the details of the routing, adhering to the specified intent, with- out the user having to both visualize and solve the interconnect problems at once. This significant simplification over current design tools means users converge on a Figure 3: Built-in 3D viewer allows reviewing of a section of the board or complex via structures with pan, zoom, rotation, and spinning to reduce iterations with mechanical design teams or PCB fabricators without introducing errors Figure 4: Multi-line routing with contour hug option accelerates through no-click routing on flex section of the PCB designs