Altium Designer’s unified environment saves weeks on Aeroflex’s PCB designs.
“With Altium Designer we don’t just keep pace with technology, we set the momentum. Since switching to Altium’s unified design environment we route boards 100 times faster and save weeks on our board designs.”
- Ricardo Paez, br /> PCB CAD Designer, Aeroflex
The need
The phenomenal pace of technology is one that Aeroflex is all too well aware of, with a 70 year history of creating sophisticated microelectronic and test measurement solutions. Aeroflex’s product diversity and global reach continue to grow as the technology progresses. This is evident when viewing Aeroflex’s extensive range of product solutions for aerospace, defense, avionics, and broadband communications industries.
Yet, the demand for innovative and high-speed electronics grows. The pressure is particularly felt by engineers who must continually develop smaller and faster electronic designs, in shorter periods of time. To keep pace with the driving pace of technology, Aeroflex needed to readdress and improve its design flow processes and efficiencies.
The challenge
Revising design processes wouldn’t be easy – change is often met with resistance. However, without change, it is easy to become stagnant and lose the edge that separates an organization from its competitors. This was particularly so with Aeroflex. Its engineers were still manually routing and checking boards, which is an enormously inefficient and time consuming procedure.
Aeroflex has a large customer base and a diversified product range. Change would affect several processes and several products and therefore any system implemented would need to accommodate the design challenges of each product range. This created additional pressures for Aeroflex. To successfully implement change to its design process Aeroflex would require a highly flexible electronics platform that could cater for all of its PCB needs.
The solution
To readdress its design process, Aeroflex had to completely overhaul its electronic design processes. One of the key changes was to create a seamless design flow and bring together separate electronic processes into a single design platform. Altium’s unified design environment provided the ideal solution by converging hardware, software and programmable hardware. Altium’s user-friendly graphical user-interface delivered the flexibility and ease of use that was needed to eliminate the downtime associated with a toolset change.
As electronics become more complex, the roles of design abstraction, integration and automation begin to play an important role. For example, engineers can save time by having Altium’s auto-router determine routing paths for selected parts of the board. Rather than implementing basic functionality, engineers can now concentrate on the value-adding aspects of the design. However, automation doesn’t equate to loss of design control. Altium Designer’s Design Rule Check (DRC) in the PCB editor allows engineers to create a set of specific requirements for the design whilst also testing and monitoring crosstalk, reflections, and net lengths for high speed designs.
The results
Since implementing Altium Designer, Aeroflex has experienced remarkable results. Engineers generate Gerber files faster, create footprints more efficiently and more accurately and complete schematics in days, not weeks. One of the biggest improvements however, was found after using Altium Designer’s auto-router and DRC. The painstaking task of routing and checking line by line is now completed in minutes. Using Altium’s intuitive tools and wizards, Aeroflex can route boards 100 times faster and with 100% success
Aeroflex has seen board layout and schematics improve and design flow efficiencies dramatically improved. PCBs that used to take up to six weeks to complete are now being turned over in two or less – an overall productivity increase of up to 80%.
Product Information
Aeroflex designs and manufactures microelectronic solutions for applications in: aerospace and defense, avionics, cellular communications, land mobile radio, telecommunications and wireless data. Much of Aeroflex’s success is due to its reputation for superior product performance, and its success and experience in space satellite communication semiconductors.
Customer information
Aeroflex is celebrating 70 years of innovative solutions in microelectronics, test and measurement products. Since its inception, Aeroflex has grown into a renowned international company with over 2,600 people in offices worldwide.
For more information, visit http://www.aeroflex.com/