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