Product category:
Design and Development Software
News Release from: Mentor Graphics UK | Subject: XtremeAR
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 11 April 2006
Software promises faster route to big
boards
Mentor Graphics Corporation has begun delivering its XtremeAR product targeted at electronics companies designing large PCBs.
Mentor Graphics Corporation has begun delivering its XtremeAR product targeted at electronics companies designing large PCBs XtremeAR, Mentor's second product to use the company's patented Xtreme design technology, enables the simultaneous execution of autorouting on up to 15 processors, thus cutting routing times on large boards from days to hours
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 21 Feb 2001 at 8.00am (UK)
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The significant productivity improvement and design cycle time reduction improves time to market for large designs, and also improves quality and system performance by enabling designers to perform several design trials and choose the best results.
"As an award winning service bureau, our customers are continuing to require shorter design cycle times", stated Nick Barbin, President of Optimum Design Associates.
"Now with XtremeAR, we can reduce our layout times on large boards by days and even weeks".
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"This puts us at a competitive advantage and enables our customer to get to market faster".
Over the past years, Mentor has continued to focus on its technology leadership initiative, which has resulted in several highly innovative developments.
The company's patented Xtreme design technology provides the core for the industry's only capability to support multiple clients on a LAN or WAN network to simultaneously update a centrally located PCB design database.
In November of 2004, Mentor announced the first application of the Xtreme design technology, XtremePCB.
This application enabled multiple CAD designers to simultaneously perform interactive place and route on a PCB with real time updates to a common database.
XtremePCB was targeted at users performing manual routing and resulted in design cycle time reductions of 40-70% during the layout process.
XtremeAR is the next application of the patented Xtreme design technology and is targeted at users who are able to autoroute their large boards.
XtremeAR uses the processors from up to 15 computers on a LAN or WAN network working simultaneously on the same PCB database.
This cuts the routing times by up to ten times and can utilise second and third shift computer resources that would ordinarily be idle.
Not only do these savings result in shorter design cycle times and higher designer productivity, but also can result in better design quality and system performance by giving designers time to run several trial component placements and routing scenarios and then pick the best results.
"Our unique and patented Xtreme design technology can now help companies who use autorouting on large, mostly digital boards", said Henry Potts, Vice President and General Manager of Mentor's Systems Design Division.
"We worked closely with several of our customers to develop this application and it is meeting their most optimistic cycle time and productivity expectations".
XtremeAR is available now and uses the same licences as XtremePCB clients, giving users the flexibility to use the Xtreme design technology on either manual layout or autorouting depending on their needs.
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