Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/929192
JANUARY 2018 I DESIGN007 MAGAZINE 13 ends are, which are the plated-up layers, where you can use the roughness data from the core supplier and where you need to talk to the fab- ricator about roughness data. So yes, talking to other CAD systems, and making life easier in terms of modeling copper roughness are two primaries of focus now, and that's the areas we'll be pushing into the first quarter of 2018. Shaughnessy: Thanks, Martyn. Rick, do you want to chime in about DownStream? Rick Almeida: So, for us, we're working on a big release right now, bringing our CAM prod- ucts and our documentation product more in line with one another, for post-processing. But there are two areas we're working on now. One is with the IPC-2581 Consortium, to build a stack-up visualizer that allows us to do a couple of things. One is to visualize stack-up data that we use in CAM350 to model the PCB, and in BluePrint for layer stack-up details in the documentation, as well as sharing infor- mation between the designer and the fabri- cator using an incremental 2581 format to go back and forth. There's one other area that we're working on. For a while now, the EDA companies, Cadence, Mentor, Altium, and Zuken and so forth, have been introducing a lot of 3D design capabil- ity into the front end of the process—the front end for us. What we're looking to do is bring that 3D information into the back end of the process. We've got some unique challenges to do that, particularly being unable to extract 3D data intelligently from the CAD systems, but the area we'd be working on is visualization of the bare board in 3D, doing some facsimile of component rendering because we don't feel that users will want it to redesign models at the back end. We're doing more of a 3D rendering STEP model import for the purpose of viewing the PCB in 3D, viewing the PCB panel in 3D, to understand where you might have conflicts between components and mill cutouts and so forth, especially on assembly panels, and then 3D documentation to augment 2D documenta- tion that engineers are producing now. Those are the two areas that we are pretty much focused on for the next nine months, until we get this release out the door. Shah: So, along the lines of what Rick is talking about, as you know, we partner with Down- Stream. We actually OEM their technology and sell it as Allegro Manufacturing Option. Three years ago, we started collaborating, building the products together, and what customers were asking for was to have approval sign-off technology like DownStream has, and we cre - ated the Allegro Manufacturing Option prod- uct that works very closely with Allegro PCB Editor. Customers wanted a way to check their designs before going to manufacturing, that it's fabricatable, number one. Number two, what they wanted was an easy way to create docu - mentation to hand off to manufacturers, and this is wher e the blueprint technology comes into play, and it's one of its kind in the industry. Now what we hear from customers is that this is good and many of our customers have adopted the Manufacturing Option, but they asked us to do these manufacturing checks during the design process. So as the design is being created, they wanted us to do DFM checks, so that they don't go through the design, do all the work, and have to redo some of the work because of the problems found at the tail end of the process. So we built the industry's first and unique CAM-ready, built-in DFM rules that are checked in real time with- out any performance issues. As you're placing a component, you can find out if it is too close to the board edge, which is So we built the industry's first and unique CAM-ready, built-in DFM rules that are checked in real time without any performance issues.