Mentor Graphics broadens its reach of PCB designers
Since then, inflation and tool upgrades have brought back the competition’s most comparable products within the 10,000 dollars price range, hence the new found opportunity for Mentor to address what the EDA company describes as the advancing needs of the independent engineer.
These independent engineers are typically part of a small to mid-sized company, or members of an isolated team within a large enterprise (e.g. building prototypes, validating reference designs, and performing manufacturability studies), and perform the complete design, analysis and manufacturing data delivery of printed circuit board (PCB) electronic products.
In the past, for engineers doing complex design, their only option was to look at enterprise solutions, and for many, these solutions were out of their reach due to budget and heavy infrastructure requirements.
Today’s lower-priced offerings run out of steam and do not support their complete needs since their design process can often include more than schematic entry and layout of the PCB, but may also require analysis such as signal integrity, thermal, design-for-manufacturability, and power distribution network integrity.
With the delivery of three new PADS products (Standard, Standard Plus and Professional), Mentor has combined classic PADS product ease of use with three levels of design technology at affordable pricing.
PADS Standard offers schematic and PCB layout with a starter parts library, part creation wizard and archive management priced at $5,000 USD including support.
PADS Standard Plus starts with the PADS Standard, plus advanced constraint management, high-speed net constraints and routing, central library creation and management, HyperLynx-powered signal/thermal/analog simulation, and variants design priced at $10,000 USD including support.
PADS Professional expands on the PADS Standard Plus, including Xpedition-powered technologies such as sketch routing, simultaneous 2D/3D layout, hierarchical placement planning, component and net explorers, manufacturing prep and design review/compare priced at $18,000 USD including support.
Features include a correct-by-construction methodology, enabled by a common constraint management system used across the flow to support advanced high-speed topologies and design for manufacture, minimizing design cycle iterations by getting it right the first time.
The tools feature integrated, accurate, easy-to-use analysis and verification technology so designers can virtually prototype their system powered by the HyperLynx product with signal/power integrity analysis, analog or thermal simulation and advanced full-board rule checks, minimizing expensive, time-consuming physical prototype cycles.
They leverages the technology powered by the Xpedition product for placement/planning, 2D/3D layout, dynamic power distribution design, and constraint-driven routing including the Sketch Router tool to tackle the most complex layouts.
With the part library access, engineers can use over 360,000 parts via PartQuest, a fully integrated website that also merges Digi-Key part numbers with symbols and footprints, reducing manual errors and saving time and cost.
The PADS products also support design validation for fabrication and test, and preparation for manufacturing hand-off and documentation. They manage and archive different design revs for a simpler reviewing process across the organization.
More information at www.pads.com
Visit Mentor Graphics at www.mentor.com
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