Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/553274
32 The PCB Design Magazine • August 2015 Matties: as you were saying, there are many iterations. Viklund: There are many iterations, because first you try to simulate, and it doesn't work so you try again. And that intricate process takes a long time because every time you have to send data back and forth between RF design tools and board tools and integrate and simulate and so on. It just takes a long time. You might be sur- prised how many people still use the ASCII files that transfer RF circuits from, for example, ADS or National Instruments Microwave Office into board tools. And when they do it that way, it becomes a dumb metal blob that the tool can- not make anything smart out of. It's just a blob; you can place it and it comes out in your fab- rication data. But the problem is, every time something changes, they have to do that entire process again because there is no intelligence. So what we try to help these companies with is to say, "Well, if you have intelligent data in your ADS or Microwave Office tool, let's try to maintain that intelligent data in a round trip." So that you can send that data into our tools and implement it into a bigger system, bigger context, but still maintain all the parametric shapes and programmable shapes that you have. You're able to set up things like tuning expres- sions and then, by just a push button, send the data back into ADS or Microwave Office again to analyze and make adjustments, optimize and then just send the adjustments back into our tools again. But that loop has actually proven to shorten this design cycle by more than 50% in most cases. It's significant. Matties: People must be pretty excited about that. Viklund: They are very excited about it. But it's hard sometimes to adapt a new methodology. If you've been doing one thing for 20 years and now suddenly we tell you to do something dif- ferent, and you won't see the benefit until the middle or end of your project rather than im- mediately, that's challenging to people. They say, "I know I have a pretty good project. You're telling me to use a little bit of time up front." Yes, I am, and you're going to gain it back. Peo- ple are more and more adapting to this. matties: Cycle time is still the focus. Viklund: It is. Cycle times and more important- ly number of cycles. If you can do one cycle and you're done, that's what everybody wants to do, but there could be various reasons why you can't. Sometimes there are legit reasons that you have to do multiple things. But you don't want it to happen because you didn't under- stand the design from the beginning and you don't realize it until the end. You want to make sure the tools talk the same language and the design keeps its intelligence so that you don't have to redesign because you lost something in translation. Matties: if you were looking at creating the most efficient process, what advice would you give your customer? feature MENTOR GRAPHICS HELPS BRIDGE GAP BETWEEN PCB AND RF continues Figure 1: Per Viklund, director of iC packaging and RF product lines at Mentor Graphics.