System Analysis Knowledge Bytes: A Quick Overview of Clarity 3D Workbench
As an ECAD engineer, you design products for industries like automotive and Internet of Things (IoT), among others. Your tasks might include electronic packaging design elements like merging a package design with the printed circuit board (PCB), or importing and merging mechanical structures such as cables and connectors with the PCB.
You have to be extremely careful while working on the design because even a minor error might cause the entire design to fail. For example, if the 3D CAD geometry is not imported and placed on the PCB accurately, you might face misalignment errors and the PCB might fail. Not to mention, the pressure that you face to deliver the designs faster to meet the deadlines.
What you need is a tool that makes your life easier. A tool that enables you to import and merge the mechanical structures with the PCB at the exact location. A tool that is able to repair the geometry problems and misalignment errors with ease. A tool that enables you to easily import file formats of Cadence, as well as the industry standard data, with parameterization and equation expressions that allows modeling flexibility and simulation optimization. And yes, there is such a tool. It's called Clarity 3D Workbench!
What is Clarity 3D Workbench?
Clarity 3D Workbench is a part of the Cadence Clarity 3D Solver solution that is designed for electromagnetic and power electronics analysis and simulation. Clarity 3D Solver also comprises of the Clarity 3D Layout tool.
Clarity 3D Layout is designed for the extraction of S-parameter models for power-integrity (PI) and signal-integrity (SI) analysis for the IC package and PCB designs, whereas Clarity 3D Workbench enables you to import mechanical structures, such as cables and connectors, and merge them with the PCB. This allows the critical 3D structures that cross from the board to the connector to be modeled and optimized as one structure.
Clarity 3D Workbench incorporates a 3D mechanical CAD GUI for creating, editing, and importing 3D solid models for electrical analysis. It provides a 3D view of the design and editing functions that you can use to perform the necessary structure modifications in 3D perspective. It also enables you to perform these complex tasks with a lesser memory.
You can bring in design data from popular MCAD formats, such as ACIS, IGES, and STEP as well as Cadence Allegro and Sigrity formats.
The Benefits of Clarity 3D Workbench in Electronics Packaging Design
Clarity 3D Workbench provides a number of benefits, of which the main ones would be:
Easy-to-Use GUI
Clarity 3D Workbench provides an intuitive and easy-to-use GUI to make your life simpler. The GUI functions and commands are extremely simple and enable you to create and modify designs easily and efficiently.
Model Analysis and Healing Functions
Models imported from other geometric modeling systems may have ACIS errors or some other errors that are not acceptable in downstream applications. Clarity 3D Workbench provides analysis functions to catch such errors and healing functions to resolve them automatically.
The Analyze Entity dialog box lets you analyze the selected body by checking the parts and the topology validity, detecting tiny parts, as well as measuring body-to-body relationships. Whereas, the Heal Geometry dialog box allows you to correct the geometry or topology related problems after you import or before you export the data.
Importing Design in Other Formats
You can import multiple Clarity 3D Layout databases and merge them with other Clarity 3D Workbench structures, as shown below.
Merging Structures in Clarity 3D Workbench
Importing and Exporting Components
A 3D design consists of multiple components where multiple designers are involved in creating these components. You might have to share the components created by you with other designers or you might have to create components to be used by other designers. With Clarity 3D Workbench, you can import and export the components, encrypt the components, and make the components editable so that other designers can also work on them. The Export Component dialog box lets you export the selected parts as a component file. The file must have a .3dcomp extension.
The Export Component Dialog Box
Creating a Design
You can even use the Clarity 3D Workbench GUI to create a design. Watch the following getting started videos that demonstrate how to create a design of an inset-fed patch antenna, run the simulation, and view the simulation results.
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The first part of the video demonstrates how to create a design of an inset-fed patch antenna using native 3D parts. |
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This part of the video demonstrates how to assign materials, nets, and boundary conditions to the various components of the inset-fed antenna. |
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This final part of the video demonstrates how to set up the simulation options, set up the computer resources, run the simulation, and view the simulation results. |
Related Resources
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Product Manual |
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Online Courses |
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Webinar |
For all Clarity enthusiasts there was a great opportunity to learn about Clarity through a webinar by Srdjan Djordjevic. Here is the link to access the recording of the webinar: Introduction to Breakthrough Technologies Clarity (Webinar part 1) Cadence Training Services now offers free Digital Badges for all popular online training courses. To find out more, see the blog post Take a Cadence Masterclass and Get a Badge. |
Hope the knowledge collateral shared via this blog helps you get a quick overview of Clarity 3D Workbench. Stay with us as we continue to explore what’s new in the world of Cadence Sigrity and Systems Analysis. For information about the most recent enhancements, check the Sigrity and Systems Analysis 2021.1 What's New. Happy reading!