Trending toward profitability: there's money to be made through efficient PCB design. But you'll have to extract every spare second and dollar to do so.

THE FIRST DECADE of the new millennium delivers no real surprises in PCB design trends: boards are more complex, speeds are sizzling, digital content is growing, differential signals are exploding and no one wants to pay more. Nor are there any real surprises among the business trends: market windows narrow, products themselves are shorter-lived and everyone wants to pay less. The real changes will be in the ways that companies deal with the relentless progression of these trends--every incremental shortening of design cycle time or increase in data speed requirements reverberates right to the bottom line.

For PCB designers and manufacturers, there is no one-size-fits-all answer. Business models ultimately determine strategies; while one company outsources design, another expands internal capabilities. Without a clear plan for taking time and cost out of the design cycle, however, profitability is at risk whatever the size of the company or its business model.

Start with the big picture. Maximize time and cost savings by taking into consideration that every chip has to go into a package and onto a board. Today's high pin-count devices and gigahertz data rates require designers to look at the entire interconnect, from the redistribution layer of the IC where I/O placements are made to manufacturing output data. By constructing an abstract or virtual model of the interconnect (a topology that describes the entire interconnect from I/O buffer to I/O buffer), system-level decisions can be made and signal integrity (SI) ensured.

Focus on the package. With the cost of packaging threatening to become one of the most expensive pieces of the end-product, the competitive cost advantage will go to those who consistently solve the packaging problem. For new designs, use a design solution that allows an IC and its package to be co-designed and eliminate the risk of mask re-spins while meeting performance requirements.

Capture design constraints early on. Performing circuit and PCB topology exploration in the initial stages of the design process can increase circuit reliability and drive known good requirements into the back-end. During the back-end design process, engineers and designers can analyze and validate topologies against signal integrity requirements. Implementing an SI-driven process helps minimize potential SI-related issues, which could require board re-spins and lab debugging. Capturing key constraints in a common constraint management system also eliminates the need for translations as constraints are passed to down-stream tools.

Conquer design reuse. With an estimated 90% of boards involving some amount of design reuse, manufacturers must take control of the process. Design environments that enable reusable interconnect topologies and template-driven place-and-route techniques help ensure that physical implementation of the design meets requirements. Team-based design reuse modules that permit designers to share common circuitry and update existing modules at the schematic and board level take additional cost and time out of the cycle.

Team up on complex boards The pressure to shorten design cycles is complicated by today's globally dispersed design teams. New design partitioning methodologies that allow team members to work simultaneously on individual partitions--whether digital, RF or analog--in view of the larger board help teams deliver products on time. Now, multiple PCB designers can work concurrently on a layout while sharing access to a single database. Designs are partitioned into multiple sections for layout and editing by design team members. While working, designers can view the partitioned sections and update the design view, enabling design status and progress to be seen by the team.

Help your partners to benefit. Various advanced high-speed design and analysis tools now provide the ability to create high-speed silicon design-in kits, i.e., blueprints for implementing a silicon device into a PCB system. Such kits allow engineers to accurately simulate PCB topologies with minimal setup. IC companies can shorten new device adoption time and systems companies can accelerate PCB system design cycles.

Link up with your partners. Every company must optimize its design and supply chains. OEMs, EMS providers, component suppliers, design teams and board manufacturers have to be linked by automated processes that ensure data integrity from concept to completion, across design domains. For true collaboration, PCB library and data management solutions must allow for controlled access to data at various stages of the design process. These work-in-progress systems must also be integrated into enterprise-wide product lifecycle management systems so data is available to the entire design chain.

The future of PCB design? It's safe to say that it's not going to get any easier. Competitive companies must become more agile, more connected and more focused on getting time and cost out of the design process.

A.J. INCORVAIA is an engineering group manager at Cadence Design Systems. He can be reached at [e-mail].