14-06-2021 | Cadence | Design & Manufacture
Cadence Design Systems has launched the Cadence Allegro X Design Platform, the industry’s first engineering platform for system design that unifies schematic, analysis, layout, design collaboration and data management. Constructed upon proven Allegro and OrCAD core technology, the new platform revolutionises and streamlines the system design process for engineers providing exceptional collaboration overall engineering disciplines, integrating best-in-class Cadence signoff-level simulation and analysis products, and more excellent layout performance.
Engineers today frequently must design and collaborate over multiple domains, including EM, thermal, SI/PI, and logical/physical implementation. The platform’s simplified user interaction model provides quick technology access and immediate value for novice and expert users. By reducing iterations and offering access to the logical and physical domains together with concurrent collaboration capabilities across schematic, layout and analysis activities, the platform diminishes the time and effort to develop the design of complex systems by up to 4X compared to legacy design tools.
The platform employs a hybrid cloud solution that offers scalable compute resources and full technology access while decreasing deployment footprints and complexity. With the platform, engineers may now provide high-quality designs with access to the Cadence Clarity 3D Solver, Celsius Thermal Solver, Sigrity technology and PSpice for simulation and analysis, Allegro Pulse for design data management, and interoperability with the AWR Microwave Office RF design flow.
The Allegro X platform produces significant improvement in design throughput and performance. By using GPU technology together with core architectural optimisation, performance is accelerated over a wide range of operations. In addition, the Allegro X platform utilises cloud resources to synthesise full or partial PCB designs. Innovative ML techniques concurrently optimise the design for manufacturing, SI and PI requirements while designing the PDN, device placement, and signal interconnect as specified by the system architect/electrical engineer.
“The Allegro X platform establishes a unified engineering platform, boosting overall design team productivity up to 4X. Engineers now have a framework for logical and physical design, in 2D or 3D, single- or multi-board, that allows them to optimise resources even on the most complex 5G designs, enabled by interoperability with the AWR Microwave Office RF design flow,” said Tom Beckley, senior vice president and general manager of the Custom IC and PCB Group at Cadence. “Cadence R&D has been working diligently with academia and industry partners on groundbreaking, analysis-driven PCB synthesis that significantly enhances design productivity.”
“Harnessing the power of accelerated computing by using NVIDIA GPUs enables Cadence’s Allegro X platform to boost performance up to 20X for interactive operations,” said Greg Bodi, director of PCB layout engineering at NVIDIA. “This performance improvement delivers our engineer's immediate canvas responsiveness and acceleration when 2D rendering complex boards during the design phase.”
“Multi-objective optimisation is a challenging problem, and I am pleased that MIT students and alumni have made significant progress working inside Cadence on novel ML solutions towards the synthesis of difficult PCB designs. The resulting system will not only benefit MIT but will also significantly improve productivity in the PCB community at large,” said Dr Tomas Palacios, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT.
