EW - Design Edition - Mentor Graphics CFD Software, Solido Machine Learning & More

Advanced Circuits Upgrades PCB Artist 3.2

(Image courtesy of Advanced Circuits.)

Advanced Circuits has launched version 3.2 of its free PCB design software PCB Artist. Version 3.2 includes upgrades to the software’s “Library Manager,” improving the way users search and identify components from a library of over 500,000 parts.

Another new option called “Fetch Component” (on the Schematics and PCB Context Menu) allows for component placement to the user’s current cursor position. 3.2 also expands its “Color by Net” feature to include “Color by Net Class” on both the Schematics and PCB Drawing modes for sorting and visualization of the different nets and net classes in the users’ PCB design. Finally, a more accessible “Working Grid” is now editable from the Status Bar.

For more information, visit the Advanced Circuits website.

Cadence HiFi 3z DSP Architecture

(Image courtesy of Cadence.)

Cadence has announced the Tensilica HiFi 3z DSP IP core for system-on-chip (SoC) designs targeted for mobile and home entertainment applications, including smartphones, augmented reality (AR)/3D goggles and digital TVs.

Higher voice sample rates require more complex voice pre-processing. Enhanced Voice Services (EVS), a mobile voice codec supporting voice over LTE (VoLTE), supports up to a 48kHz sample rate, compared to 16kHz for the previous AMR-WB codec. The HiFi 3z DSP delivers 1.3X better performance for EVS than the HiFi 3 DSP core.

Key features of the HiFi 3z DSP include:

Dual load/store
FLIX bundling (multiple-base ISA operations per cycle)
Double the MACs for 16x16 (octal MAC)
Enhanced ISA for accelerating FFTs, FIRs and IIRs

Additional specifications are available on the Cadence website.

Mentor Graphics CFD Software

(Image courtesy of Mentor Graphics.)

Mentor Graphics has released FloTHERM, a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software for electronics cooling simulation. The FloTHERM product includes Command Center, which allows users to understand the product design space by defining variations of the base models.

The Command Center design window streamlines the interface and user work to increase productivity. FloTHERM identifies potential thermal problems early in the design stage to lower the costs of thermal testing and design re-work, enabling users to get their products to market more quickly.

This release introduces several Command Centre features that aim to make scenario definition and design space exploration more intuitive: easy-to-find objects, attributes and settings; “find” tool with multiple applications for variant creation; interaction with spreadsheet tools; and efficient simulation of hundreds of models.

Details concerning pricing and availability can be found on Mentor’s website.

Solido Machine Learning-Based EDA Software

(Image courtesy of Solido.)

Solido has announced the launch of its Machine Learning (ML) Labs. ML Labs enables semiconductor companies to work with Solido in developing ML-based EDA products to address design challenges. In particular, Solido has ML technologies intended to address:

Data acquisition problems, where using brute force methods are time and resource-intensive and can generate overwhelming amounts of data, leading to uncertainty
Big data issues, where scarce expert resources are required to provide data insights
Data visualization problems, where advanced user interfaces are required

For more information, visit the Solido website.

Zuken Assistant for CR-8000 PCB Design Suite

(Image courtesy of Zuken.)

aZuken and XJTAG have partnered to enhance Zuken’s CR-8000 with a design for test (DFT) capability that will improve test coverage during schematic entry. The capability is based on XJTAG’s DFT Assistant and will be available later this year as a free plugin for Zuken’s CR-8000 Design Gateway users.

CR-8000 is a native 3D product-centric design platform for PCB-based systems. It supports architecture design, concurrent multi-board PCB design, chip/package/board co-design and 3D MCAD co-design. CR-8000 Design Gateway is Zuken’s platform for logical circuit design and verification.

XJTAG DFT Assistant will help to validate correct JTAG chain connectivity while displaying boundary scan access and coverage onto the schematic diagram through integration with the CR-8000 Design Gateway.

Additional details about the partnership can be found on the Zuken website.

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