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July 2014 • The PCB Design Magazine 15 feature OPTIMIzINg COLLABORATION FOR PCB SySTEMS DESIgN continues Collaboration is Everywhere Regardless of your team size, there are al- ways plenty of opportunities for collaboration; this business isn't a good place for hermits. Be- cause collaboration involves transfer of data from one person to the next, and often from one tool to another, multitudes of "neutral" files have sprung up over the years as hand-off mechanisms. Some formats have survived the ages to become de facto or formal standards, but even formal standards are subject to inter- pretation at the sender or receiver, leaving them as imperfect media for collaboration but still the best option in many cases. Within vendor tool flows, the most efficient collaboration is achieved by sharing the same database, leverag- ing a client/server architecture so that there are no errors in translation, and absolute concur- rency is achieved. Due to inefficient collaboration environ- ments, traditional design processes were very serial in progression—one stage would be com- pleted before the next was started. ECOs were painful to execute, and thus discouraged. Im- proved flow integration and collaboration stan- dards have enabled concurrent design processes that significantly reduce design cycles, and pro- vide additional opportunities for design valida- tion and optimization (virtual prototyping). Collaboration opportunities can be broken down into those between engineering disci- plines (e.g., ECAD/MCAD, FPGA/PCB, and de- sign/manufacturing) referred to here as "inter- discipline collaboration, and those within an engineering discipline (e.g., multiple engineers working on a schematic, or multiple designers working on a layout) referred to as "intra-disci- pline collaboration." Figure 3: Organizational and design complexities scale. The challenge is to complete the design within a reasonable time, while optimizing quality and cost.