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38 The PCB Design Magazine • July 2014 terial provides 20nF/in 2 which is an excellent way of amassing additional planar capacitance. The tight integration between the ICD Stackup Planner and PDN Planner allows the automatic transfer of the effects of different dielectric ma- terials to the PDN for analysis. 2. Design Reuse If the same switching regulator or proces- sor and memory chips, for instance, are used on consecutive designs, creating a library of matching "reuse blocks or snippets" for sche- matic and PCB makes the best use of existing design elements for future designs. Simply add a sub-circuit block to the schematic, transfer to the PCB database, and load a predefined layout block including component placement, tracks, copper and text. Whether it is used for multi- ple channel designs, critical digital circuitry, RF circuit blocks, or just to replicate a commonly used layout pattern, design reuse will save time and ensure repeatability of design: a proven, tested, working solution to just drop into place. 3. Collaborative PCB Design For many years designers have attempted team design, to avoid the seemingly unavoid- able routing bottleneck, using multiple PCB de- signers to route different sections of the board at the same time. Schematics and layouts can be divided into function blocks for example: power sup- ply, analog, digital, memory and SERDES. Or, multiple designers can work on the same sec- tion simultaneously in different parts of the world. I have done this many times, providing an over-night design service for US based com- panies. Co-design implies that a group of de- signers can work on a design at the same time and all their design inputs are accepted. But obviously, this is full of traps and there has to be some form of priority when merging data- bases. In recent years, some EDA companies have developed tools to enable designers to collabo- rate, compare and merge designs and these ca- pabilities include: CONCURRENT DESIgN continues beyond design Figure 3: PDn Analysis using multiple capacitors per decade and 3M ECM planar material.