Design contest winners show their creativity

Innoveda announced the winners of its fourth annual design contest, at the Innoveda International Users' Conference 2002, held recently in San Diego.

Innoveda announced the winners of its fourth annual design contest, at the Innoveda International Users' Conference 2002, held recently in San Diego.

The awards recognise the outstanding work of customers who combine Innoveda's leading interconnect solutions with their own innovative designs to create highly complex PCBs.

Winning designs were selected on the basis of complexity, ability to be produced, usability and maximum use of various technologies.

In addition to software and monetary prizes, winning companies are promoted on the Innoveda website.

The Grand Prize went to Colleen Salvaggi of Brooktrout Technology, who used cutting-edge design reuse capabilities of Innoveda's PowerPCB layout solution to combine two designs into a highly complex, densely packed, high-end printed circuit board for a telecommunications application.

Salvaggi also won the award for digital design, in which she used several Innoveda solutions to design a board used as a component in several phone network products.

The award for manufacturability design was won by Mark Bartlett of GE Transportation, who employed Innoveda's PCB tools, including physical design reuse capabilities to develop a fail-safe, special-purpose industrial controller used in railroad signalling applications.

The award for analogue design went to John Klostergaard Nielsen of Danish company Grundfos Management, who used multiple Innoveda solutions to design an extremely compact multilayer printed circuit board to be used as a frequency convertor for asynchronous motors and pumps.

All components were mounted on one side for this application.

Autorouting with BlazeRouter went to Ed Naimster of CIENA Corp, who achieved a unique data/voice communications board design that required multiple parts set on different angles, by using the "any angle" feature of Innoveda's BlazeRouter solution in addition to other Innoveda tools.

And the Mixed Technology award was won by Brad Teague of Dolby Laboratories, who used Innoveda's high-speed solutions to design a multichannel reference decoder for professional applications in broadcast and post-production facilities.

According to grand-prize winner Salvaggi: "Using Innoveda's solutions, we were able to overcome many design challenges.

With several 100ohm, matched length, differential impedance lines running at 4mil lines with 6mil spaces, 18,206 surface mount pads and 13,708 connections, the project faced serious placement and routing design challenges.

To fan out of the 0.8mm BGAs, we used dynamic route editing.

Innoveda's design reuse was well worth every penny when it came time to combine two separate databases into one to create a 14-layer board that can handle 672 simultaneous phone calls - and it did it flawlessly".

"We look forward to this contest each year for the creativity shown by our customers in developing applications for a wide spectrum of important applications used in everyday life", said Jim Martens, director of Product Marketing at Innoveda.

"Our conference attendees are always in for an incredible learning adventure as they join fellow users to exchange information, share experiences and techniques, network, and discover future directions".

Additional information on the conference and contest winners is available on the Innoveda website.

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