STANDARD INTERFACES
Ken Karnofsky, the MathWorks' marketing director for DSP and communication products, notes that the PC has few limitations when compared with Unix workstations.
"One big advantage of the PC," he explains, "is the wealth of plug-and-play software and hardware interfaces." This allows engineers to first use the Matlab and Simulink software to design their concepts and fine-tune their systems. Then they can connect with third-party boards carrying DSPs and FPGAs, enabling rapid prototyping and development (see "PCs Bridge The Gap Between DSP And FPGA Designers," p. 58) .
PCs are used across the design cycle, exploiting standard interfaces throughout: Matlab for research and exploration, Simulink to do the system design and nail down details, and then interfacing to PC-based EDA tools for implementation.
PC-based EDA tools aren't new. What's new is the power of today's versions. The OrCAD line of PC-based EDA software was one of the first and most successful lines, and it's now part of Cadence Design Systems. Martin Koechel, Cadence's senior product marketing manager for the OrCAD products (www.cadence.com) , says, "From our experience, today's PCs have sufficient power and memory capacity to make the PC an effective engineering tool. PCB tools in general do not require the latest hardware to be effective engineering workstations."
Cadence offers several complementary product lines on the Microsoft Windows PC platform: the OrCAD series and the Cadence PCB Design Studio and PCB Design Expert series. The OrCAD tools provide engineers all they need to take a pc-board design from concept to completion on a desktop. OrCAD products are used primarily by the personal engineering market in education and research, and for fast prototyping by design teams.
Cadence PCB Design Studio is for companies looking for a soup-to-nuts board-design suite that can be scaled for large projects. For complex, high-speed, constraint-driven designs, PCB Design Expert provides a fully integrated design flow that spans design entry, through common electrical constraint management, to powerful auto-interactive floorplanning and routing.
The emergence and adoption of the PC have made it possible for engineering teams to accomplish more in less time. PCs have reduced the time it takes to perform complex analysis routines, made data sharing among colleagues instantaneous, and enabled custom visualization of real-world signals. Also, because computers are ubiquitous in today's workplace, this computing power is readily accessible to all engineers. Therefore, the PC is an essential tool for engineers to get their designs to market faster, at less cost, and with higher quality. |
