“With Altium Designer we don’t just keep pace with technology, we set the momentum. Since switching to Altium’s unified de
sign environment we route boards 100 times faster and save weeks on our board designs.”
- Ricardo Paez, PCB CAD Designer, Aeroflex
The need
Being a leader in sophisticated microelectronic and test measurement solutions gives a 70-year old company a head-start in the technology stakes. The trick, of course, is to stay ahead of the competition.
And Aeroflex’s product diversity and worldwide reach continue to grow in the aerospace, defense, avionics, and broadband communications industries.
Yet, the demand for innovative and high-speed electronics continues in the sectors served by Aeroflex. So how do Aeroflex’s design engineers stay ahead, and develop smaller and faster electronic designs, in less time?
By addressing and changing its design flow processes, wholesale, and not by seeking simply to improve existing processes or approaches.
The challenge
At the centre of Aeroflex's success lies prosaic design flow processes. Simply revising design processes wasn’t going to work: change is often met with resistance. After all, improving a complex user interface usually results in one only slightly less complex. However, without change, Aeroflex risked stagnation and losing the edge that separates it from competitors. And old habits die hard: Aeroflex’s engineers were still manually routing and checking boards, an enormously inefficient and time consuming procedure.
Along with very short product development schedules, Aeroflex also has a large customer base and a diversified product range. Change would affect several processes and numerous products. Any change would need to accommodate the design challenges of each product range, creating additional pressures for Aeroflex. To successfully implement change to its design processes, Aeroflex required a new electronics design environment which could cater for all of its schematic and PCB needs, not just an improved one.
The solution
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| The Aeroflex 3500 Hand-held Radio Test Set |
Aeroflex decided to overhaul its electronic design processes head-on. How? By changing to a single design flow that brought together separate electronic processes into a single design environment.
Aeroflex chose Altium’s unified design solution.
Benefits were immediate: from the outset, Altium’s user-friendly graphical user-interface helped eliminate the downtime usually associated with a toolset change.
Aeroflex engineers now have access to a unified design solution that lets engineers perform their PCB design and layout tasks, and their schematic capture, using a single application and design environment.
And the higher abstraction that Altium brings to expert tasks such as autorouting, frees designers’ time to concentrate on the high-value aspects of the designs, instead of implementing and repeating basic functionality. But this goes beyond simple process automation. For example, Altium Designer’s Design Rule Check (DRC) in the PCB editor lets the engineers control the design layout whilst monitoring crosstalk, reflections, and net lengths for high speed designs.
The unified design environment provides significant design flow benefits, such as cross-platform design rule checks and the ability to define special PCB trace widths and lengths from the schematic. As Aeroflex’s designs become increasingly complex, the high levels of design abstraction, integration and automation within Altium Designer will free its designers to explore new concepts, experiment with different devices, and also create rapid prototypes and develop them for production, more flexibly and on time.
The results
Since implementing Altium Designer, Aeroflex has experienced remarkable results. Thanks to Altium Designer’s advanced document handling the engineers generate Gerber files in a fraction of the previous time, can view them in seconds, and create drill and assembly drawings up to 100 times faster. Component footprints can also be generated more efficiently and more accurately, and crucially, the advanced design capture interface means schematics are completed in days rather than weeks.
One of the biggest improvements is in routing and checking. Altium Designer’s autorouter and DRC complete this routine task in minutes: because of the reduced errors and high routing performance, Aeroflex engineers can route boards 100 times faster than with the previous tool, and with 100% success.
Overall, Aeroflex has seen the seamless synchronization of board layout and schematics improve design flow dramatically. Because of the unified design capture and layout environment, 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%. This means Aeroflex design engineers now have the opportunity to focus on creating the value in Aeroflex’s designs rather than the routine: Aeroflex has turned into a very agile 70-year old.
For more information, visit http://www.aeroflex.com/
