A new online community provides a forum for pc-board engineers and designers to learn more about—and collaborate on—high-speed design issues. Launched by Cadence Design Systems, San Jose, Calif., the community can be found at www.specctraquest.com.
Topics such as constraint development, simulation, modeling, power-delivery system design, constraint-driven placement and routing, and achieving signal integrity are covered. Experts and novices alike can benefit from technical content provided by Cadence engineers, partners, and community members. Open discussion boards encourage members to share problems and solutions to their real-time, high-speed design challenges.
"The computer, communications, and networking markets' demand for smaller, faster products is causing engineers to push the envelope in terms of clock frequencies, new bus architectures, and gigabit-per-second transfer rates," says Jamie Metcalfe, vice president of marketing for the Cadence PC-Board Systems Division. "The result is dense, complex, high-speed pc-board systems with a myriad of design challenges to solve. Providing information on these issues is the goal of the new Cadence community."
High-speed design challenges are discussed on Specctraquest.com in an open and collaborative environment. To join, community visitors simply need to sign in and agree to follow participation guidelines. Industry experts regularly host discussions of trends and topical issues, featuring Q&A periods that let members interact with presenters. The community also offers technical articles and application notes produced by Cadence, as well as user-contributed papers, models, tools, and utilities.
According to Hemant Shah, director of marketing for the High Speed Systems Design Group at Cadence, "The new community is a creation of Cadence engineers who recognize that designers want to holistically understand the problems associated with developing high-speed boards. Then they can key in and discuss their specific concerns or successes in a worldwide, 24/7 community."
Bruce Mayer, senior scientist of Litton Advanced Systems, chairman of the CCT Users Group, and a long-time moderator of an industry list service, was one of the site's beta reviewers. "It is my experience that user communities are a fundamental resource of practical application information since they leverage the knowledge and experience of all participants," he says. "I think the new Cadence site will become a gathering place for high-speed pc-board engineers."
Specctraquest.com will be updated regularly and invites input and suggestions. Go to www.specctraquest.com.