Thinking outside the box

Great ideas unfold as they are developed and, together with time to market pressures, demand that the all phases of the design progress in parallel. But as designs become more complex, designers have always struggled to solve the problem of meshing together data from different parts of the process. Unfortunately, tool providers have tended to take the easy option and ‘stick’ the design together with tools that create intermediate files to transfer design data from, for example, the placed and routed fpga across to the board design. Unfortunately, electronics design is not a simple, linear process. “To tackle this challenge, we need to take a step back and look at the bigger design picture,” explained Altium Europe’s vp sales and support, EMEA, Frank Hoschar. “PCB design cannot be considered independently. We need to look at hardware design, programmable hardware design and software development as a whole and provide a design environment that unifies these traditionally disparate design disciplines. This requires more than passing intermediate files back and forth between separate design programs. It requires real, platform level unification of all the processes involved.”