OrCAD Layout is the most popular PCB Layout application in South Africa. You cannot buy it any more. A nostalgic feeling is evoked a bit like the last sale of Volkswagen Beetle and Kombi models in the last century. If I could buy it tomorrow, I would, because it was the perfectly priced package, it was easy to learn and use, and it is very capable.
The paradox of the industry is that the biggest buyers of the most complex PCB design tools today, use only one type of chip on their DDR2 PCB … a memory chip. They have such complex timing constraints on every net and layer that it requires integration of signal integrity analysis to interact with trace routers and constraint managers in realtime with the design engineer's input. The end product is a memory module that receives memory data address and delivers data flawlessly at multigigahertz rates in your entry-level PC reliably forever.
This is the story about why OrCAD Layout and many of its competitors have no future.
OrCAD Layout is 'THE' only product being retired by Cadence and appears in OrCAD Unison PCB and Unison Ultra bundles. OrCAD Capture and PSpice have enjoyed most of the R&D spend in the last few years by Cadence, the corporate parent of OrCAD.
OrCAD Capture is the schematic capture tool of choice, and is going to be available for a long time to come. PSpice simulation, the industry standard, will also continue to be a strong player in the simulation market in the future. PSpice has always been the most flexible A/D simulator with the greatest development potential, as it was based on the original Fortran source and not the truncated 'C' compilation of that source. Complex mixed analog/digital circuit simulation is still PSpice's exclusive domain. And the open nature of the Fortran source has allowed extensive application development, that today includes the ability to integrate and simulate complex Matlab mechanical modules in realtime with electronic circuits driving mechanics through motors. The mechanical and electrical output is all displayed graphically on the same graph. Imagine a simple simulation of a motor, gearbox with switches in a control circuit driving windscreen wipers or window winders on a car. These can present complex frictional models in wet and dry and can vary due to ageing of components. Toyota was one of the first adopters of SLPS, the interface that marries PSpice and Matlab.
OrCAD Layout will be supported into 2009. It is most likely that the first problems customers will experience will be when Microsoft Windows XP Pro is no longer available … not soon. It is very important to understand that the South African electronics industry has a brilliant future. We will continue to develop products in large collaborative teams with many global partners. Many established and well known South African automotive, defence and avionic companies as well as many other 'fractionals' engage with Cadshop frequently. These companies all have leading-edge designs and demanding investors are pushing the development cycle from years or months to days.
'Design right first time' has been a tenet of the IC Design industry from 'day one'. This is now also a tenet of the PCB design industry. 'Design spins' ie, each time a prototype is reworked, cost time and money … big time. Cellphone manufacturers say a PCB respin costs $250 000 and 50 000 lost production units per day.
Whew! Lots of pressure and stress. This is mostly felt by the companies using ageing tools. Everyone is feeling the pressure from the IC industry, which is packaging parts in ever shrinking package sizes. Part footprint miniaturisation and high density pin-counts with fast clocks need more care and time to layout in old design tools. Respins are the norm as these older design tools fail to meet routing challenges and timelines for completion.
In 1986 I thought that the real winners would be the low-priced PCB design tools in a graphically challenged world. Today the world is performance challenged. The cumbersome UNIX tools of yesteryear that addressed performance and then graphics were hard to use and very expensive, and actually paved the way for today's needs. This is where OrCAD PCB Designer, the scalable solution to OrCAD Layout's limitations originated. OrCAD PCB Designer is built on UNIX based tools that have been 'trickled down' to the MS Windows environment at a fraction of the original cost.
The South African mantra of 'I need a cheap capable PCB layout tool, I do low frequency small PCB's' has been chanted for 20 years since Cadshop's inception in 1986. It will disappear. New style inexpensive chips with dense pinouts demand a total turnabout of the design philosophy and updated PCB tools.
Designers presently use 80+ pin, multimegahertz embedded controllers with multiple parallel memory and data busses, connected to a few peripheral chips with 40+ pins in the majority of designs. Think of the space all these busses take up on the PCB and the circuitry to latch and deal with the data in hardware. Product miniaturisation today is stifled by pure connectivity issues.
Today the old 10 chip multichip design is still a 10 chip multichip design. The difference is the chips talk to each other on multigigahertz serial busses. The impact of this is that there is a drastic reduction of inter-chip connections and a drastically smaller footprint, lower cost, lower layer count, higher reliability PCB design. It has become a Serial World in such a short space of time that it is news to most engineers.
That it has become a multigigahertz serial world in such a short space of time, is actually bad news to most engineers. Many companies do not realise that the PCB tool an engineer uses costs an equivalent of three months' salary and in a year the investment in that tool exceeds its cost by 400%. Most of Cadshop's design intensive customers have a 15 man-year labour investment in a R30 000 tool at an average salary of R25 000 per month. And the factory runs off this design input. Surely this indicates that the PCB design tool of choice should primarily protect the past investment and offer scalability to the needs of the company in the future.
The PCB design tool needed to achieve the new 'design quantum' is going to seem hard to use at first and will be slow to adopt. We have to lose the notion that the old tools are very capable; they were, for older technology designs, not for tomorrow's designs.
If your next design uses just one chip that needs careful PCB layout you will realise the need to upgrade to the next level of PCB design tool overnight. The added capability and complexity will astound you. If you look around at the world's most complex products today, their origin is in OrCAD PCB Designer and the extended family of Cadence Allegro tools.
OrCAD PCB Designer is the tool of the future for most OrCAD Layout users today. The upgrade is free for many existing users and there are attractive incentives for PADS and PCAD users, as translators are embedded in the product.
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