Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/994883
16 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I JUNE 2018 lower-level boards, without having to re-draw or re-design. Shaughnessy: Well, it sounds like the multi- board is just one more option, really. Is it just another option in the toolbox? Wiens: Yeah. I think we're talking about the same thing. In the world of EDA, the big word is automation. We try to find areas in the design process that are inefficient and optimize them and automate them as much as possible so that we improve the productivity of the overall team. That's what we're doing here. People are designing multi-board systems today. They've just been doing it very ineffi- ciently, and just saying, "Well, this is part of the design process. We have to suck it up." It takes longer. It produces lots of errors. It gener- ates designs that aren't necessarily optimized, but, oh well, we don't have a better way, so we're going to keep doing it. It's kind of a new frontier for us EDA vendors to try to go after to optimize that. We're working to optimize that process from left to right. We've got technol- ogy that goes all the way back to requirements capture, and we have a lot more on the right side, too, in terms of manufacturing automa- tion, and we're looking top to bottom, across multiple domains like ECAD, MCAD and elec- trical. Shaughnessy: That's another thing I was won- dering about. It seems like the MCAD side would be a little more involved than normally with multi-board. Is that accurate? Wiens: MCAD's involvement often depends on the complexity of the enclosure the elec- tronics are going into. If it's a simple box, with a lot of room, there's not much collabo- ration needed. Of course, most teams want to minimize material waste and try to opti- mize the enclosure. That requires close col- laboration between ECAD and MCAD teams throughout the design process, not just at the beginning and end. To answer your ques - tion, regardless whether it's a single-board or multi-board system in the enclosure, the frequency of iterative collaboration depends on the complexity of the enclosure relative to the boards inside. Figure 3: Connectivity defined across a multi-board system.