Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1114420
38 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I MAY 2019 Feature Interview by Andy Shaughnessy I-CONNECT007 I recently spoke with Dave Wiens, product manager, and Mike Santarini, EDA content di- rector of corporate marketing, both of Mentor, a Siemens business, about design rules and constraints, and what their customers want re- garding design rules. They explained how EDA companies like Mentor help designers con- strain for performance while avoiding over- constraining and increasing the cost of the board and also being manufacturing-aware. Andy Shaughnessy: Can you start by telling us about what your customers want in their de- sign rules capabilities. What do you try to pro- vide them as far as design rules? Dave Wiens: Customers have to take all of the design constraints and manage what might be conflicts between those and determine what the tradeoffs are to optimize the product. From a tool perspective, we try to enable who- ever is defining those constraints to do it as easily as possible within a common environ- ment, and then pass those on to whoever is going to utilize them. Often, it's the layout de- signer that has to implement the constraints. They're dealing with the physical embodiment of the product, but there are constraints on the schematic stage as well. We help them auto- mate the definition of those constraints, sim- plify the entry, but it's not enough to define constraints. You also have to validate those constraints. You must try to simplify the way it's done so that somebody can look at a design and say that it passed. It's about simplifying constraint defi- nition as well as adherence to the constraints and verification. So, how does the designer do the design and try to adhere to constraints? En- sure that the full design verification and con- straints were met and that the product is going to work. Again, the problem is constraints are coming from multiple people, for instance dif- ferent requirements on performance might be- ing at odds with each other. Shaughnessy: One of the designers I talked to said that the problem is that no one person can remember all of these things simultaneously. Mentor's EDA Perspective on Managing Design Rules