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This week Mentor Graphics released its Xpedition platform, which squarely takes aim at simplifying board layout and place and route. Long gone are the days when each component could be considered a standalone entity. Now interference, power management, thermal issues, manufacturability, and effects of routing on each component must be carefully considered in boards with growing amounts of complexity. This, of course, is not a new problem for board designers, but Mentor Graphics is offering a snappy solution to how you layout a design.

I first recall hearing about a Mentor Expedition product (the name has since changed to Xpedition) back in 2008, when they visited me to talk about an integrated solution jointly developed by Mentor and Agilent that aimed to cut RF-PCB development cycle time in half. At the time, what impressed me more than anything else was the company’s wish to provide designers with a tool that anticipated their needs, tried to speed up the design process, and move to a more systems level approach. It felt to me as if they were presenting a new way of doing things and asking, “Now, how about this? Better?” In this 2014 Xpedition, Mentor has retained this spirit and reimagined the Xpedition Enterprise platform. This week the company rolled out the new layout tool. (We can anticipate more product roll outs over the coming months.)

I spoke with Mentor Graphics’ Charles Pfeil and David Wiens earlier this month, and Dave revealed that they’d been working on this new product platform for six years, extensive beta testing is completed, and they are making it available to early adopters. The full product is expected to be available mid 2014.

Notable Features
Here’s a notable feature: If you hover over a tool tip, a video will pop up to show you step-by-step how to use that feature. Of course, the major purpose of the software is component placement, and Charles noted that the team put a lot of engineering into this feature. Xpedition allows hierarchical group placement, where you can define groups of components (e.g. DSP, FPGA, memory) and can name the group whatever you want. Once defined, the group can be placed on the board. You can drag and drop parts into the group. On the board layout, circles represent the areas available to the group (see video). Once the basic layout is complete and the functional organization is acceptable, you can opt to replace the circles with part outlines. Then, you can use the system to automatically place and route, copy/paste elements of the group.

I found the automatic routing feature really impressive. Xpedition supports digital, analog, flex, rigid-flex, high-speed, HDI, and embedded routing. Designers can route more than one line at a time, in fact, you can route hundreds of them at once.

For designers working on high-speed circuits, Xpedition supports differential pair routing where you can control the effects of noise. Performance convergence is available with equal lengths and phase match tuning. Using the sketch router (see video below), you can draw a sketch path and force the routes to go through a certain area. You can also route in arcs (handy in a staggered pin array) rather than 45 degree angles.

For manual routing, the software includes a dynamic routing feature where you click on the start point (via, pin, trace) and then move the cursor, and the trace is added behind it. When you get to a congested area, it will go through it and then once in an open area it will push and shove things to make room. When you have to edit or move a components, you can grab and move the traces and the system maintains the trace quality in the move.

In the past, Mentor Graphics’ software had an interface to a 3D system. With Xpedition, it is offering a 3D mechanical kernel in the PCB layout. So designers can operate in a single environment and switch between 3D and 2D views.

Of course, you can perform design rule checks, specifying rules down to individual objects. There is a minimum rule and an optimal rule.  If you violate the minimum rule, it turns red; if you violate the optimal, it turns yellow. There are “undo” and “redo” capabilities. In short, if you do PCB layout or design, this software is worth a closer look.