Martin Harris, v-p, sales and support in Europe for chip design tool firm Altium talks to Electronics Weekly about how the use of unified data model can bring the benefits of a more holistic approach to semiconductor design.
1. How has the design landscape changed in the last 12 months?
Organisations are increasingly looking at designing product experiences, rather than the electronics themselves. They know that the next generation of electronic products won’t be stand-alone devices, but part of an intelligent and interconnected ecosystem that will offer far more than the electronics from which they are made of. The iPhone is the most popular example of that trend.
To achieve this, more and more engineers are turning to FPGAs as a way of developing smarter and more connected devices that can be updated in the field.
Highlighting this point is a recent survey of our US customer base, which showed that more than 17% of our board-level design customers are using our Altium Designer to move functionality from discrete hardware into programmable devices.
2. What are the design challenges facing engineers in 2010?
Designers are telling us that design data management is critical to commercial success, especially in the broader context of the design and development of a complete product.
The growing dependence on electronics technology is emerging as a problem at the enterprise integration level. This is especially problematic for those organisations that do not have a traditional culture of electronics design, but are now having to deal with electronics becoming a key enabler and differentiator within their products.
3. How can design tools address this issue?
At the centre of our tool suite is a single, unified data model. This means that every designer on a design project accesses the same data model, making management of the design data much simpler.
This is then supported by full document version control support and release management tracking.
This allows electronics designers to collaborate more easily, reduce errors and develop a formal release system that can be tailored to the individual needs of the organisation.
4. What are the benefits of taking a unified approach?
The traditional approach to electronics presumed that design was a series of isolated processes.
However, we know that this is no longer the case. With a unified electronics design and data management system, electronics designers can contribute to a single collaborative design space.
They can create a formal release system that overcomes the revision management and version control issues that delay product development.
Our unified approach lets designers contribute to that single collaborative design space, create a formal release system, directly link into the manufacturing process, and develop documentation that can be tailored to the needs of the individual and the organisation’s needs.
In essence, having a single data model means no inconsistencies, greater collaboration and better version control. For example, in the next release of Altium Designer, we are planning a number of technologies designed to improve the way designers manage their design information and automate their configuration and release processes.
A new design configuration management system will let designers map design data from the design environment through to the production environment. The release management system will make it very difficult to release the wrong version to manufacture, or to peer review.
5. What is the biggest trend you’ve seen in the European electronics design industry?
Organisations are beginning to focus on the total user experience of the product.
To be competitive, organisations must consider more than just the electronics, but also what it looks like, what it connects to and how the customer relates to the product as a whole. This shift has meant a move to system level design and a greater level of integration between electronics design tools and other product development software.
For us, this emphasis can be seen with our electronic/mechanical computer-aided design collaboration capabilities, live data links to suppliers and more recently our touch sensor technology partnership with Atmel.
By linking to other software and suppliers, we can extend our unified electronics design experience, which will make it easier for electronics designers to go outside the electronic computer-aided design space and approach the design holistically.
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