Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/873992
18 The PCB Design Magazine • September 2017 the parts for wave soldering, etc. That's predic- tive. Matties: In the best case, that would be in real time. As you're designing you're getting instant feedback. Holden: Here's a great example of predictive en- gineering in an EDA tool. You may not remem- ber Racal Redac's (later Zuken) Visula, but Racal Redac was really significant in their develop- ment of predicting engineer software for signal integrity. There is a set of graphs and widgets on the screen during layout. The simulation would poke information out of the database, so as you placed parts, as you routed traces, and things like that, this thing would run these algorithms and these widgets would go from green to yel- low to red or would change, indicating if you've just done a dumb thing signal integrity-wise, or thermal-wise. You go up and click on "undo" until it became green. Then you do it a different way so it stayed green. That's a beautiful piece of predictive engi- neering software, because it's essentially a de- sign coach looking over your shoulder provid- ing you with advice and simulations without you having to run it back twice. Shaughnessy: Yes, Visula users loved it. But it's gone now. Holden: We were using Board Station. We start- ed doing this and defining who is best in class in PC layout. The Mentor software came out fifth out of five. The best was Visula. So we start- ed using Visula with Mentor as the front end. This is how we got into discovering this kind of software they had. Zuken bought Racal Redac. We already had a relationship with Zuken, be- cause HP wrote all the Zuken software. When HP went out of the EDA business, that became Sierra 5000. Visula, when we were at HP, came back to us in terms of our thoughts. We said, "Well, we really love Visula. We also like Sierra 5000, but when you merge these things together you need to take some of the best things about Visula." Shaughnessy: What would you say would be some things that designers should know and understand about predictive engineering? Holden: Well, I've had this lifelong fight with IPC and Dieter Bergman. Dieter and IPC be- lieved that if designers really just understood how printed circuit boards were made, they PREDICTIVE ENGINEERING: HAPPY HOLDEN DISCUSSES TRUE DFM GRAPHICAL USER INTERFACE DFM/A METRICS PDM PRODUCT DATABASE PDM DATA IMPORTER PREDICTIVE ENGINEERING TRADE-OFF MODELS CAD PROGRAM GENERATOR CAD TECHNOLOGY FILES PRICE/PERFORMANCE INFORMATION DESIGN INFORMATION Figure 4: Proposed predictive engineering architecture.