Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/344372
July 2014 • The PCB Design Magazine 27 feature MULTI-SITE CONCURRENT DESIgN: TIPS AND BEST PRACTICES continues continually, following the sun across multiple sites around the globe, may well be critical to your time-to-market success. Functional experts in different regions can be leveraged to continu- ally move the design forward 24 hours a day. Think of your global configuration and sup- porting EDM system as a "virtual design center" that can seamlessly manage both the individual design objects along with their relationships at any point in time at any of your global design centers, ensuring rigorous configuration con- trol throughout the design cycle. Partition the Design for Success Multi-site concurrent design employing a follow-the-sun methodology is more than just moving the entire design container from one design center to another and then back again throughout a 24-hour period. Any product de- velopment team member at any site must have access to the design data at any time. In order to facilitate this philosophy, the design team should first use its EDA tool to partition the de- sign by functional area. For example, if a design contains memory, processor, WiFi, RF, and pow- er functional areas, the design container should be configured so that both the schematic and the PCB are partitioned along those same func- tional areas. Most EDA tools support schematic partitioning using hierarchical blocks, but that's the easy part, your tool also needs to support: • Partitioning the PCB There are several ways for a design team to partition a PCB. One option is dividing the board along predetermined functional bound- Figure 3: zuken's engineering data management solution.