New design software aims to enable a seamless concurrent collaboration among multi-discipline teams working on multi-board designs. Called Xpedition, the software was developed by Mentor Graphics Corp. It is said to eliminate redundant effort during the design process and to optimize product performance and reliability with a data management infrastructure. The result is better data integrity and a leveraging of reusable IP across all boards, connectors, and cables in the system.
The new software aims to address delays in the design of systems that contain multiple 
interconnected boards (connectors and/or cables) arising from the use of separate uncoupled board and cabling projects held together by desktop office tools such as spreadsheets for intra-board connectivity, text files for system element parameters and drawing applications to show block level system structure and hierarchy. The result has poor collaboration between cross-domain design teams; costly intra-system connectivity errors; extensive time-consuming manual validation steps; and restrictive system change rules that prohibit system design optimization. This lack of holistic multi-board system design further impacts the ability to design networks of interconnect electronic systems, commonly known as system-of-systems that are commonly seen in automotive, space/satellites, industrial automation and data center infrastructure.
The new Xpedition multi-board systems design flow is said to improve design team productivity and reduce development cost by replacing inefficient paper and manual processes with an automated, fully integrated, collaborative workflow. Signal tracing, functional and signal integrity simulation, and design partitioning and re-partitioning while maintaining connectivity content is said to ensure “correct by construction” system design. The new Xpedition flow is a fully parallel collaborative design environment where global teams can work in realtime, providing companies with the flexibility and intuitive technologies to develop innovative and competitive products.
Key Features:
Single desktop engineering environment for architecting, partitioning, authoring and documenting the logical definition of electronic multi-board systems
Managed synchronization of multi-board systems board designs enabling interface reduction, removal of manual data handling, data duplication and ECO transfer errors
Integrated connector management that eliminates connectivity mating errors, from the initial design conception through the entire design cycle, including PCB projects and purchased components by design
Integrated multi-board system level connectivity verification Built-in change management through controlled synchronization between multiboard system boards and cables
Integrated management of logical cable connectivity into physical representations, including bi-directional collaboration with 3D MCAD
Collaborative concurrent design environment for engineers and implementation teams assigned to partitioned functions and related boards, while automatically managing data integrity and connectivity
Integrated library browsing for intuitive system-level part research, selection and management
Leverage existing architecture IP by importing and embedding Visio data into the system design and by attaching characteristics to system elements
System data management enables multi-discipline collaboration and facilitates reuse of boards, connectors and cables across the team
The new Xpedition multi-board systems design solution is available today and additional product information can be found on the website: www.mentor.com/xpedition
