Design007 Magazine

Design007-July2019

Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1140547

Contents of this Issue

Navigation

Page 69 of 115

70 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I JULY 2019 Flex007 Feature by Andy Shaughnessy I-CONNECT007 With the launch of the new Flex007 sec- tion in Design007 Magazine, we asked David Wiens, product marketing manager with Men- tor, a Siemens Business, to tell us about their tools' flex and rigid-flex design capabilities. As David explains, today's higher-end design soft- ware tools are optimized for flex design, mak- ing workarounds a thing of the past. Andy Shaughnessy: What are your customers' biggest challenges in designing rigid-flex? David Wiens: Engineering teams have designed advanced rigid-flex products for years using a series of workarounds to their EDA tools, often verifying with paper dolls. Rigid-flex designs require advanced stackup constructs (e.g., mul- tiple outlines, each with its own stackup, and new materials). There are also additional rules that need to be applied, including bend/fold control with collision clearances, curve rout- ing with arcs and teardrops, hatched plane fill shapes, component placement limits in flex ar- eas, and fabrication rules around board stiffen- ers and coverlays. The workarounds naturally take longer to implement and often result in er- rors because the design must be checked man- ually. This can lead to a non-optimized product because once something is designed, nobody wants to go back and make ECOs. Some errors, such as copper micro-cracks, create long-term product reliability issues. Manufacturing is also a challenge. Design teams must align with their manufacturer to understand the costs of different rigid-flex structures—costs can go up quickly—and optimize the hand-off from de- sign to manufacturing. Shaughnessy: Tell us about the rigid-flex design capabilities in the latest versions of Mentor's tools. Wiens: Our solution sup- ports flex, rigid, or rigid-flex with a common set of func- tionality. Native support for flex/rigid-flex extends across the flow, from initial stack- up definition through de- sign validation and manu- facturing outputs, eliminat- ing time-consuming workarounds. It starts with an independent stackup for each rigid or flex element; these can easily be mod- ified or overlapped. This approach limits the Mentor Tools: Optimized for Flex and Rigid-flex Design Figure 1: More designers are using flex than ever before, but working in 3D presents its unique challenges. David Wiens

Articles in this issue

Archives of this issue

view archives of Design007 Magazine - Design007-July2019