Cadence PCB success stories

Tait Communications and Cadence

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The Company Headquartered in Christchurch, New Zealand, Tait Communications designs, develops, manufactures, tests, deploys, supports, and manages innovative digital wireless communications environments for organizations worldwide that protect communities, power cities, move citizens, harness resources, and save lives. As the company's PCB design manager, Dave Elder leads a team of five other PCB designers who develop radio communications equipment for a global customer base. Typically, the team works on roughly one new PCB design per month, and each design could lead to about 100 different product variations. The team also develops custom designs for its customers. Key Challenges Until recently, Tait's PCB designers had been managing schematic and footprint library models manually using spreadsheets and custom-written scripts and utilities—a time- and labor-intensive process. "We often duplicated our efforts because we couldn't—even with our distinctive part names—find a particular part out of the thousands that we manage," noted Murray Hall, a senior design engineer at Tait who also now, on a part-time basis, manages library development and administration. As a long-time Cadence ® user, Tait turned to Cadence for a solution to automate its library management process. "Our manual methodology was both time-consuming and error-prone, which was giving us inconsistent and inaccurate results" noted Hall. In addition to better library management, the ideal solution also had to be able to manage design reuse modules. Explained Elder, "Our PCB designs are unique, and we tend to have various rigid requirements on design reuse. A lot of our products are governed by regulations, so we need to be certain that what we say we are putting on a PC board is accurate. We wanted version control and the ability to guarantee the accuracy of the components on our boards." Tait Communications and Cadence Business Challenges • Shorten library creation process • Make it easier and faster to locate parts • Maximize library management resource utilization Cadence Solution • Allegro ® Design Workbench • Allegro PCB Library Workbench • Allegro PCB Editor Lessons Learned • Implement automated library management via a phased approach • Synchronize Allegro PCB Library Workbench with an ERP system for timely, accurate parts data Results • 25% faster library creation process • 25% more schematic capture productivity • 10% more PCB design layout productivity • 40% less time spent managing parts libraries • 15% reduction in duplicated part library effort • 20% improvement in library model accuracy • More agile regulatory compliance process • Access to more up-to-date, accurate parts data • Faster, more efficient process to install software updates across the user base

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