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28 The PCB Design Magazine • July 2014 aries with each designer routing to common virtual points. Another option is to simultane- ously design without fixed boundaries. Design teams that are new to concurrent design, or with dense, highly-constrained designs, will find the former easier and more straightforward to implement than the latter. Furthermore, in the divided approach the PCB split often emu- lates the schematic partitions, not only facili- tating the work in progress concurrent design, but also promoting subsequent vaulting of PCB blocks for reuse. • Management of schematic and PCB partitions both individually and as a whole The EDM system needs to do more than just manage check-in and check-out, it needs to have a true understanding of the ECAD data. For example, if one schematic partition is checked out from your EDM system for edits, the other partitions should still be visible as read only in the schematic editor. The same applies to the PCB. • Centrally managed parametric data The component engineering tools should "suggest" the most appropriate component to a design engineer for a given partition based on corporate defined criteria such as price, avail- ability, number of suppliers, pending obsoles- cence and reliability. This capability simulta- neously improves quality while also properly managing component inventory. • Proper management of design rules and constraints Just because the design is partitioned doesn't mean the design rules and constraints become unusable. The EDA tool should support central constraint management for both electrical and physical rules that understands how to apply the constraints within the context of the parti- tioned schematic or PCB. feature MULTI-SITE CONCURRENT DESIgN: TIPS AND BEST PRACTICES continues Figure 4: The "follow-the-sun" design methodology.