Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/929192
12 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I JANUARY 2018 For example, we can provide different dash- boards for management to look at, to see how a project is progressing. We can look at the library content and help people optimize what's in their library, what parts are obsolete, what parts are being requested by engineers—infor- mation critical to other domains such as sup- ply chain. Then we bring that all together, and pres- ent that back out to the enterprise, and that's impor- tant, when you're trying to link in supply chain and manufacturing in real time with a need to get your design out quickly. So that's the front end, Pulse. The other compo- nent of this is, how do we manage that data? For us to capture that data, we must bring in a holistic way of managing the work-in-process data, so we're actually driving into the work in process and native design data management within our applications to capture that data. We can do this transparently and in near real time, because we have the work in process BOM, design and library data. What we are doing differently is pushing data management under the surface. Historically, it's been hard for our industry to adopt design data management, because it changes the design methodology too much, and engineers have enough on their plate, let alone doing some logistics around "How do I check in and version a file?" So, we're pushing that below the surface, and making that transparent for the engineer, so it's as simple as a "save." It's at that point we use our knowledge of the tools and data extract and characterize the informa- tion. This is what allows us to get all that great metrics data that we can use to promote back out to the enterprise for collaboration. Shaughnessy: Martyn, what's new at Polar? Martyn Gaudion: Thanks for having me, Andy. It's very appropriate that the guys from Cadence are here. A lot of the focus on our tools outside of fabrication is in pre-layout. A lot of people use our tools prior to layout to set the stack-ups they're going to use, and once they've worked on a series of different technologies and stack- ups for different types of technology, they need to feed that information into the CAD system. Now we've been working with Cadence, and we're doing a new project now to smooth the path of our data into the layout of those other systems. We find that people work on stack-up long before they've committed pen to paper, and certainly the linking to other systems is an area we particularly want to focus on. Fol- lowing the meeting we had at PCB West with Cadence, we're looking at doing that in even more detail. So that's a key area we're working on, smoothing the pre-layout path into layout. The other area we're working on is, we've been doing a lot of focus on copper roughness modeling for insertion loss, and we've been improving the tools to do this. The more recent techniques we've put in have been somewhat academic, especially Huray, and a lot of feed- back from our customers was that this method required input from scanning electron micro- scopes and some quite complex data to feed in which isn't easily accessible. We've worked very closely with Bert Simonovich, who I think you know well, and Bert has helped us provide a method "cannonball stack" to take the RZ roughness data from the copper foil, and feed that in and reduce numbers which we can feed into Huray methods making a much more real- istic approach for the average PCB specialist. From the first quarter of next year, we're incorporating cannonball stack both into Speedstack and Si9000 the ability to put RZ, and use that for insertion loss modeling. So, for people who want to get a first pass on inser- tion loss, that should make life a lot easier, and require a much less expensive kit. But we're also, also educating people that you need to make sure that the foil surface you're modeling is the real surface that gets used, so it's impor- tant for designers to understand where the drill Mark Hepburn, Cadence Design Systems