System Engineering Capabilities in Mentor's Capital Suite

In the latest release of Xpedition, one of the biggest areas of improvement is within simulation. There are many checks that had been incorporated into the ECAD environment.

• Signal and power integrity checking are both very important in the engineering industry and are becoming harder to run as nets and circuit board systems get more complex.

• Vibrational analysis checking runs excitation analyses similar to what would be seen on a shaker table.

• Electrical rule checking involves looking for shorts and other errors in electrical design.

• Schematic checking looks at the logic of the board itself. Typically you would have another electrical engineer do a peer review of your board, but by running this analysis, the schematics will be automatically found for you.

These are all checks that have been around for a while in the mechanical space, with the idea that you can have an engineer run a simulation early on and get directional feedback to make better design decisions. With the capabilities now, checks more accessible and feasible in the electrical board systems development space. Xpedition’s update holds a lot of potential, especially in reducing the number of respins in projects.