Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/929192
14 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I JANUARY 2018 a very common occurrence with PCB design- ers, and they need to know if they're too close to the board edge, or even a slot. , If you don't detect it early enough, you'll place other cir- cuitry around it, and then when you find the problem later in the cycle, then you have to move a lot more of your circuitry to fix that one problem. There are more than 2,000 rules in Allegro PCB Editor, to enable this DFM tech- nology. The announcement for this was done around PCB West, but we continue to enhance it, and our focus will stay on this technology, expanding this technology in other areas for manufacturing. Shaughnessy: OK. Now I'd like to open it up to everybody. What do you see as the biggest challenges? For your own company or for the industry? What do you guys worry about? Almeida: I'll jump back on the 3D. The biggest challenge we see is that you've got a lot of 3D definition going on in the design world, but there's really no vehicle to get that data out of the design world into downstream processes, no pun intended. Typically, you can export in ODB++ or IPC-2581, and you get all the design intelligence, but any of the 3D definition as far as model assignment and component ren- dering is still con- tained within the CAD system. You use Gerber, you get no intelligence and no component information. The only other real option would be to use a STEP file import, which we're looking at and have actually started implementing, but STEP has its own shortcomings. You get a better rendering of the PCB assembly with more realistic components, but you lose a lot of intelligence that's tied into the board, like for layers and nets and so forth, and being able to interrogate the various individual pieces. And for me, as an industry we're continuing to see the design community embrace 3D for design. I think that's just a natural evolution. I think that's going to be a key area, and how do you take that 3D and bring it further into Down- Stream? Not just into fabrication, but all the way into production and rework and so forth, where 3D can have a big impact, and right now there's really no vehicle between the design side of the chain and the manufacturing side of the chain. Shah: On the design side, the challenge is with availability of STEP models that are accurate and realistic, and so customers struggle with trying to get 3D models. Now there are tools out there that allow you to create these 3D models, so we introduced Allegro ECAD-MCAD Library Creator. It enables quick creation of 3D models as you create a 2D footprint. You can also create a 2D footprint from the 3D model, so now they are synchronized. The challenge of synchronizing these libraries between ECAD and MCAD is addressed through ECAD-MCAD Library Creator. Now, Rick's right that now you've got to have intelligence in these models, as well as the assembly, so you can't just go into the STEP world and lose all the intelligence. That's one challenge we have, and we believe that's a challenge industry should tackle in short order. And then the last piece, of course, passing the data to manufacturing, you have all the 3D data in the design. How do you pass it to man- ufacturing in an intelligent manner? That's the challenge. Shaughnessy: Interesting. Martyn, what keeps you awake at night? Gaudion: Well, it doesn't keep me awake, but we see our customers now being faced with such a huge range of options and material choices. Whereas a designer may have previously had the opportunity to select a generic FR-4 or a high-speed material, now all the material sup- pliers have a huge range of materials for heat Rick Almeida, DownStream Technologies