National Semiconductor designs and manufactures analogue and mixed-signal semiconductors. Its products include power management circuits, display drivers, audio and operational amplifiers, communication interface products and data conversion solutions. It offers a range of reference designs and development boards to accompany its ICs, as well as an online design environment called WEBENCH, which is used by its customers to create many thousands of unique designs each month on the internet.
Bradley Kennedy, PCB Design, Manufacturing & Standards Compliance, Principal Engineer, and Oliver Landine, Design Engineer, discuss how Altium Designer has helped National Semiconductor’s Evaluation Board Group to standardise PCB design and to develop a consistent, corporate feel to its products.
National Semiconductor has a rich legacy of reference designs that have been done in various different programs during its 50 years of existence. Across the company’s multiple different product lines and within each product line, design and applications engineers continue to develop reference designs – that can be downloaded from the company’s website – and associated evaluation boards.
Several divisions within the company
produce approximately 30,000 evaluation boards each year, and also provide the
schematic files for the boards, which range from simple, low-power designs to
very high-power and high-speed designs.
The company wanted to standardise the use of templates and libraries to drive internal efficiencies in the organisation, so that it could get product to market faster and at a reduced cost. An Evaluation Board Group was established to develop a common platform for customers to evaluate its products and to implement a consistent look and feel to all the company’s products.
“The constraints are very diverse across the company,” explains Bradley Kennedy, Principal Engineer, PCB Design, Manufacturing & Standards Compliance, National Semiconductor. “We’ve been promoting one design tool to do all designs internally so that they can be shared, and so that elements of one design can be reused in another to achieve consistency across the groups.”
“The major challenge is integrating and storing, archiving, collecting and distributing all the design data that we have collected,” says Oliver Landine, Design Engineer, National Semiconductor. “We want to create uniformity in the source code of the designs as well as in the way they are presented.”
Four years ago, National Semiconductor selected Altium Designer as its standard corporate design tool and began to phase it in across the company. “We chose Altium Designer because of the capabilities within the product, the ease of use of the product, and its import capabilities,” says Kennedy. “It was far more dynamic and broad than other products, and allows us to share IP across our various divisions.”
Another key reason for choosing Altium Designer was its ability to interface with WEBENCH, National Semiconductor’s online design environment, which is used by customers to create many thousands of unique designs each month.
Error-free, manageable and manufacturable designs
Using Altium Designer, templates and standard forms were produced to create a consistent ‘look and feel’ to all National Semiconductor evaluation board designs. The templates are for PCB, schematic and bill of materials, as well as assembly and fabrication notes that are needed for board production.
“We’ve also created templates for documentation supporting the board, such as test templates and user guides,” says Kennedy. “All of these live in one location to avoid having multiple revisions and discontinuity.”
“Rather than having one central CAD department, the workload is distributed, and design and application engineers can do the designs themselves,” Landine explains. “PCB designs that have been done in OrCAD, PAD and Eagle are easily imported into Altium Designer – a feature that has saved us time, particularly when importing old designs.”
Altium Designer’s OutputJob Editor allows outputs to be set up for designs, and manufacturing files are generated simply by including the OutJob that has been previously created. “We set up the New Document Defaults feature so that when we start a project, we’re starting with a default schematic, default title block, default PCB, and OutJob,” says Landine. ”We use the OutJob feature extensively. It is configured to work with the libraries and when they work in tandem, it is really powerful.”
National Semiconductor designers use
the ERC and
Using Altium Designer’s Design Release Manager, the user automatically produces the outputs from the OutJob template. “At the push of a button, designers can generate the outputs that we need to work with our vendors. They can generate the schematics, pick-and-place files and other relevant information, put it in a known folder that’s separate from the working folder where they are working, and we can do that with the source files as well as the outputs,” says Landine. “The Design Release Manager helps us manage and archive source material such as schematics or Gerbers for boards designed in the past. It has been a very helpful feature; it makes us more efficient.”
Standard common libraries manage designs effectively
Using Altium Designer’s Parameters Manager, parameters can be easily added to a library of components. According to Kennedy, Altium Designer’s library management capability allows designers to manage the addition of new components to the library without compromising design and production time. Libraries have been established with set parameters, component parameters that are common between the libraries and some default parameters.
“Having the common library allows us to manage most of our component build and our designs effectively,” Kennedy explains. “The local or custom libraries allow the user to create the component that he/she needs if it is not already in the common library. We don’t want to delay creating a board and ultimately delivering the board to our customer because the engineer is waiting for a librarian to create a new part.”
“You can add parameters to the components in the design or change the given parameters very quickly and it will work with your OutJob template,” Landine adds. “Then we can generate a bill of materials with the push of a button.”
According to Landine, Altium Designer’s Integrated Library feature is used to compile libraries from the same source tables that are used for the company’s WEBENCH online design tool. These libraries are then distributed to internal users. “Our internal users have access to the same passive components that our WEBENCH users have on the web,” he explains. “In the past we used to find it difficult to locate parts in those libraries. For example we have thousands of resistors that we can search through parametrically. The new search capability added to Altium Designer in Winter ’09 has made it easier for a casual user to search through the libraries parametrically, find the resistor, capacitor or inductor that they want, and place that in their design.”
Easier for engineers, polished products
The effort invested to develop standard libraries and templates is paying off.
“We are able to deliver a more polished product to our customers, with the information that they need and nothing extra,” says Landine. “The templates and libraries that we created with Altium Designer have made it easier for engineers to develop schematics, lay out boards, generate Gerbers, go to manufacturing and carry out testing.”
According to Kennedy, using the
common libraries, common components and rule sets, engineers can design and lay
out a board, provide the files, and get the board fabricated, assembled and
tested without difficulty. “When an engineer creates his own components, does
his own layout, follows his own rules, he may have a component that doesn’t
match the footprint,” says Kennedy. “He may have two components that are too
close together, he may have any number of fabrication and assembly issues. By
using Altium Designer’s common libraries and
Push-button BOMs
“Overall we’re using the libraries and templates in Altium Designer to develop designs faster and more consistently in a consistent format,” says Landine. “In the past we had unknown formatting for bills of materials. Now bills of materials are formatted the way we want and with the information we want in the order we want. The engineers are able to generate them with the push of a button. They can quickly change a design for their customers and re-generate the outputs, give it to their customer with a professional looking output, and we are getting the information we need so that we can work more quickly with our suppliers.”
“Because we have the same tool as the customer, we can make the changes ourselves in the source file, send it back to the customer, they understand more quickly, and time and money have been saved, and everybody’s much happier,” Kennedy adds.
Outstanding training
Engineers can access presentations, videos, links to Altium Designer training videos and other relevant information via specially established internal websites. Altium’s five-minute ‘quick-hit’ training videos are particularly outstanding, says Landine. “If I want to train users internally, I don’t have the time or resources to do a better job than those videos, so we link to them all the time,” he says.
According to Kennedy, the training and support offered by Altium are making it easier for the Evaluation Board Group to promote the adoption of Altium throughout the organisation. “Altium has very good online documentation and an excellent technical forum,” he says. “The Altium training videos, the training, and the phone and email technical support enables us to champion the use of Altium within the corporation.”
Organised for the future
According to Kennedy, with Altium Designer as National Semiconductor’s common design tool, engineers are now able to create end products and supporting products such as evaluation and demo boards more effectively.
“In the future, standardising all our libraries and design templates will make it much easier for engineers to design a board with a consistent, corporate ‘look and feel’, and will help us streamline our back-end processes, such as component procurement and assembly, or address any issues with developing the boards and providing them to our customers,” Kennedy says. “We’ve been able to change our processes. We know where everything is, everything is in its place and the hooks and the architecture of Altium Designer allow us to have everything organised and clearly understood.”
