Manage your data, manage your profits: with library and design data often located in separate systems, integration can save you time and money.

CONTRARY TO THE cliche, it's anything but business as usual for today's PCB systems designers and manufacturers.

Short design cycles, slim profit margins and globalization have redefined the industry. Most businesses focus on what they do best, and either outsource or partner to accomplish the rest. The result is an expanded, interdependent design chain with a whole new set of dynamics. Key to success in this environment is the efficient management of library and design data and processes. Design teams, procurement departments, component suppliers, board manufacturers and electronic manufacturing service (EMS) providers have to be connected in an automated secure environment that ensures data integrity. Otherwise, errors and delays can occur during the design process and eat away at profit margins.

While the effectiveness and thoroughness of approaches vary, most businesses today practice some form of data management, whether structured or ad hoc. To ensure your company has the most effective solution, consider the attributes of a library and design data management system optimized for board-level electronic design.

It's integrated. The solution provides a managed process for library and design sharing worldwide. Design tools need to be integrated with a data and library management system in a single environment. Design teams can work online with manufacturing, suppliers and other collaborators in a secure, shared workspace.

It allows fast access to both technical and business parts data, within the enterprise and beyond. When researching parts for a design, engineers can quickly find up-to-the-minute component data from their desktops. Here's where all the integration pays off. Suppliers may hold current parts data in various company systems, as well as outside the company. Bringing all of the relevant data together into one view on the desktop saves time during component research and promotes the use of preferred parts and suppliers. Additionally, as library parts are created or updated they are automatically distributed to specified design centers, ensuring everyone in the design process is using known-good library data in their designs.

It embeds design-data management to enable collaborative design. Design team members need access to the latest version of a design regardless of where they are or what time zone they are in. The emergence of work-in-progress data management permits controlled access to data at various stages of the design process, making true collaborative design possible. It lets designers control changes, maintain a history of design revisions and make the newest design data available to the team. Design partitioning techniques allow engineers to work collaboratively but independently, radically reducing design cycle times.

It protects intellectual property. By defining roles, responsibilities and access rights team members inside and outside the firewall are permitted to securely access relevant design data. With view and markup technology, they can participate in design reviews even if they don't have the tools that originally created the design.

It manages design reuse across the enterprise. Design reuse is increasingly important in getting products to market on time. In a good library system, design modules are easily saved, searched and selected for use in subsequent designs.

It supports regulatory compliance for directives such as RoHS. An up-to-data library makes selecting compliant parts and validating designs for compliant and non-obsolete parts easy. "Where-used" functionality identifies designs that are affected by changes to the parts library allowing users to consider the impact to the overall business as well as individual projects.

There are many bottom-line business reasons to implement a comprehensive library and design data management system--shorter design cycles, reduced design costs, less rework and higher-quality products. But, perhaps the biggest benefit of all is, if you aren't spending time managing data, you have more time to do what you want to do--design and build creative products.

AJ INCORVAIA is vice president, research and development at Cadence Design Systems. He can be reached at [e-mail].