What’s New in Allegro PCB Design

The board design phase is probably the longest step in new product introduction. Cadence^® Allegro^® PCB design helps you to shorten your overall design process by improving individual and team productivity. Easily minimizing rework by bringing more and more of the post-design verification and analysis process into the early design stages.

Allegro PCB DesignTrue DFM Technology

Manufacturability and testability are fundamental requirements for all your designs. Ultimately, the burden of making a design manufacturable and reliable in the field lies with the PCB designer, regardless of who is responsible for manufacturing or service. Allegro PCB DesignTrue DFM Technology brings real-time manufacturability rule checks into the design environment, minimizing rework and easing new product introduction. Manufacturing rules cover all areas of PCB fabrication, assembly, and test—etching, lamination, drilling, plating, solder masks, silk screens, assembly, and test points.

Integrated Design for Fabrication, Assembly, and Test Constraints

Manufacturing rules are managed as constraints in the familiar constraints manager, coexisting independently with electrical rules that can have greater or fewer constrictive constraints. Fabrication rules cover outlines, masks, annular ring, copper spacing, holes, and silkscreen, to name a few. Assembly rules cover outline, component, fiducial, and pastemask checks. Design for test (DFT) rules help you make sure your test points are accessible and aren’t under a component or near a component too high to access at an angle.

Automatically Translate External Design Constraints

Automatically read and include manufacturing design in constraint manager to ensure no errors are created by manual translation.

Real-Time DFM Verification

With DFM rule checks you can easily sopt violations within your canvas in real time while designing, making it easy to find and fix errors from the start.

Signoff with Confidence

Double-check your DFM rules before signoff with a forced batch check of all rules for your entire design. If you do find something awry, it’s easy to locate and fix in your design.

DesignTrue DFM Partner Portal

Easily request customized DFM rules specific to your design’s technology needs directly from your manufacturing partner. Automatically import those rules without spreadsheets or error-prone manual entry, so you can get real-time DFM rules feedback while you design. Learn more about the DesignTrue DFM technology partner program.

Actionable Analysis Results for PCB Designers

PCB design is where the science of signal integrity (SI) goes from theoretical to real. By bringing actionable analysis results to the PCB designer—in their own environment—Allegro PCB design helps designers complete complex designs faster by minimizing post-analysis rework.

Crosstalk Analysis and Vision

Easily identify and fix crosstalk issues in your design without being an SI expert. Color-coded and numeric visual cues highlight potentially problematic traces on your based on Cadence Sigrity^™ analysis technology the experts rely on.

Return Path Analysis and Vision

Easily identify nets with inconsistencies between the signal and return paths and quickly find the cause in real time while you design without waiting for the SI engineer to perform analysis and provide feedback.

Impedance Analysis and Vision

Trace segments or parts of a segment are color coded to show impedance discontinuities based on analysis of where the reference plane is. Segments are color coded to reflect whether the impedance is above, below, or meets the impedance constraints.

Coupling Analysis and Vision

Coupling analysis and vision provides a view of where crosstalk issues may occur. Visual feedback on where higher coupling is occurring and who the aggressor is allows PCB designers to reduce iterations with SI and power integrity (PI) engineers. Hovering over a trace gives designers the detailed information they need to resolve the issues.

Allegro Symphony Real-Time Concurrent PCB Design Collaboration

The way we collaborate is changing. Everyone is hyper-specialized and spending expert engineering resources where they can make the most impact, which is one aspect of making sure your team is running at peak efficiency. Cadence Allegro PCB Symphony^™ Team Design Option supports collaborative placement, routing, auto-interactive routing, interactive routing, and shape design to let your team dedicate their time and efforts to get designs done faster through real-time concurrent design collaboration.

Collaborate With or Without a Dedicated Server

Establish a remote server that client users connect to, allowing for dedicated hardware resources and more reliable centralized access. Or use a simple startup—a single-use server on any client machine to enable instant collaboration between peers on a given design.

Real-Time Concurrent PCB Design Collaboration

Local and dispersed teams can collaborate in real time on a single design, and instantly see the changes being made by their teammates. Conflicts are easily avoided by restricting access to an object or objects being edited by a user, dramatically reducing routing time and eliminating the need to merge multiple versions.

Managed Constraint Manager Controls

A single user can have exclusive access to define or update constraints through the constraint manager while all other members continue to design in a constraint-driven flow.

Interactive 3D Canvas with Rigid-Flex in Collaborative Environment

Individual engineers and designers can visualize the board in the interactive 3D canvas while other team members continue in their own 2D or 3D canvas.

Interactive 3D Canvas with Rigid-Flex and Seamless Mechanical Collaboration

Your products all have three dimensions. And viewing them in 3D is great, but going back and forth from a 2D design and a 3D visualization feels a lot like trial and error. Don’t just view in 3D, design in 3D with the Allegro interactive 3D canvas.

3D Bending of Flex Material

Bend flex circuitry in your design individually or in groups to verify assembly and fit to see any collisions that may happen when folded.

3D Component Placement and Movement

Move and place components in 3D, where it’s easiest to find and fix collisions.

Seamless ECAD/MCAD Collaboration

Product design is a collaborative, but often an iterative process between multiple domain experts. It’s a delicate balancing act of maintaining the divide between domains of expertise but allowing for smooth collaboration.

Advanced Productivity Features

PCB routing is where designers spend most of their workday. Productivity, teamwork, and the right-first-time accuracy that Allegro delivers are the best ways to shorten your overall design time.

Place Vision

Visualize propagation delay constraints in real time while you place critical components, so you can balance optimizing design performance and finding enough room for everything.

Managed Circuit Reuse Placement and Replication

Create reusable modules of completed circuitry from your library to use in new designs, even on boards with different layer stackups. Applying the module is as easy as copying and pasting in a document, but unlike copy-paste, you can manage the module in a library and share it with your whole team.

Route Vision and Optimization

Automatically center individual routes between via and pin channels, and evenly space between multiple routes for clean and neat routes when hugging and shoving. Clean up and optimize traces for spacing and balance, functionality, and manufacturability—an easy way to improve performance and yield—with one quick look. Visualize object- and route-spacing constraints while routing to determine whether a trace will fit before attempting.

Front-End Schematic Aided Placement

Speed up design transfer and component placement by:

• Placing components relative to their location on the schematic
• Placing all associated components relative to the parent pin location
• Placing associated decoupling capacitors with BGAs, allowing you to easily place hundreds of capacitors near the pins that need to be decoupled