Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/969348
APRIL 2018 I DESIGN007 MAGAZINE 61 are the issues that most of us do not under- stand. Many enterprise-level EDA tools feature an expert system that performs this function. HyperLynx DRC Free Edition brings some of those capabilities to everyone's desktop. It is like having an SI engineer sitting next to you, nudging you in the ribs whenever he notices that you have missed an aspect of the design that you may want to reconsider. One would assume that an export to Hyper- Lynx DRC would be streamlined in Mentor's own PCB layout tools, Xpedition and PADS, so for this exercise I exported the ODB++ format from Altium Designer. This creates an ODB directory in the current folder. The available import formats are listed in Figure 2. Once the database has been loaded, the design rule parameters need to be set. One might think this to be a daunting task. How- ever, HyperLynx DRC was specifically devel- oped for the novice designer, so the guys at Mentor have done all the hard work for you. The Project Setup Wizard walks you through, and explains in detail, the entire setup, which you can adjust to on the fly, if you have the knowledge. Alternatively, you can just accept the defaults, which seem to work fine unless there are specific requirements. You also need to verify that the software correctly recognized the components, signals and stackup data. There are filters already set up for components by reference designa- tor and differential pairs, single-ended signals and power nets by their naming convention. These can easily be modified by substituting an "IC" for "U," etc. But, my design had no such issues—too easy! Now that the layout database is loaded, veri- fied and all the rules have been set up, the DRC Figure 3: Analysis setup. Figure 4: Executing batch mode DRCs.