Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1489778
42 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I JANUARY 2023 native PCB design tool or through a direct and seamless integration with another design/ simulation program 1 . Now that ECAD/MCAD collaboration has helped bring electrical and mechanical co-design under one roof, design- ers can instantly pass ECAD data into the MCAD system and vice versa. What else can the ECAD industry do to support product design? Based on both my personal experience with client projects and current ECAD industry trends, here are some things I'd love to see. Cable and Harness Design is area is finally coming to fruition from my preferred EDA vendor, and I expect similar features from others. Many products, whether they are multi-board assemblies or requiring a connection to an external product, may do so with custom cables, custom or standard mated connectors, or flex ribbons. Harness and cable definition at the logic level, visual integration into the assembly, and even physical design of custom cable assemblies— these are all essential parts of product devel- opment. e immediate benefit is in MCAD, where the connector and cable can be viewed in a larger system. However, the broader ben- efit is in simulation and rules checking, where logical definitions in interconnects are used to examine electrical behavior. is takes a much higher-level view of sys- tems design and eliminates the phenomeno- logical modeling required in larger assem- blies. For example, a harness-plus-cable model extracted from measurement or simulation could be used in SPICE to examine signal and power propagation across the interconnect before creating the PCB layout. Embedded Development I continue to be surprised at the lack of sup- port for embedded development by ECAD soware vendors. I oen make the joke to my ECAD/EDA clients that our industry has totally ignored embedded, and that we've done this at our own peril. e closest we've come to supporting embedded systems devel- opment falls into three areas: • FPGA system-level planning • Embedded compilers targeting specific chipsets • Version control What we don't see is an integrated devel- opment environment (IDE) as part of a PCB design application, where users can create and manage libraries, their codebase, vendor libraries and code examples, reference design codebase, and a project's revision history. On the FPGA side, it would be wonderful if designers had the ability to see information a developer would see in the FPGA vendor IDE. We need this type of information to complete schematics for some of our most complex proj- ects; being unable to see how IP can be imple- mented in our boards has led to redesigns, delays, and of course, cost overruns for the cli- ent. Component Packaging In the future, I expect to see our industry shi its focus to different types of electronics assemblies, especially as length scales continue to shi smaller into UHDI. Here I'm referring to heterogeneously integrated components on substrates and interposers, where the designer takes control of the component capabilities and footprint. In particular, I expect the packaging revo- lution to create a major shi in the way sys- tems design teams approach new products, and especially the role PCB designers have to play in product development. IC substrates are basically just small circuit boards with very fine features; as the packaging market and heterogeneous integration starts to look a lot like the standard PCB market, PCB designers have the skills to immediately fill this product design gap. It may take several years, or possibly a decade, for the traditional electronics design