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Design007-Nov2019

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18 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I NOVEMBER 2019 myself fortunate to have been both a user and provider of EDA tools; I think my experiences as a designer help me make better decisions with the capabilities we're developing today. Shaughnessy: What do you see as the biggest challenge right now for PCB designers and de- sign engineers? Westerhoff: SI has been one of those things that people have typically "left to the experts." When I worked at Cisco, we had centralized SI groups supporting multiple design teams. The design team looked to the SI expert to de- termine what the routing rules should be and validate the design once routing was available. That worked when the number of critical inter- faces in designs was small, but that's no longer the case. Just about every signal on every de- sign now qualifies as "high-speed" if you com- pare the driver's edge rate to the net's electri- cal length. But what's a designer supposed to do? There aren't nearly enough SI experts to go around, and the ones we do have are focused on the cutting edge stuff. Designers still need to make tradeoffs on high-interfaces when Feature Interview by Andy Shaughnessy I-CONNECT007 I recently caught up with Todd Westerhoff, product marketing manager for Mentor's Hy- perLynx signal integrity (SI) tools. Todd dis- cusses some of the challenges that he and his customers are facing and why good design skills have more influence on a PCB than any software tool. Andy Shaughnessy: Hi, Todd. For those who may not be familiar with you, give us a quick background about yourself and your time in PCB design and EDA industries. Todd Westerhoff: I've been working with system simulation tools for the past 40 years. I start- ed with digital logic/timing/fault simulation at GenRad and HHB Systems, added circuit simu- lation at FutureNet, VHDL at Racal-Redac, RF/ microwave analysis at Compact Software, and then got into high-speed design while consult- ing through ViewLogic. I've spent the past 23 years in SI, working for Cadence, Cisco, SiSoft, and Mentor, a Siemens Business in both design engineering and EDA marketing roles. I consider Todd Westerhoff on the Value of Solid Design Skills

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