Cadence Launches New Allegro X Design Platform to Revolutionize System Design

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Cadence Design Systems, Inc., debuted the Cadence Allegro X Design Platform, the industry’s first engineering platform for system design that unifies schematic, layout, analysis, design collaboration and data management. Built upon proven Allegro and OrCAD core technology, the new Allegro X platform revolutionizes and streamlines the system design process for engineers—offering unparalleled collaboration across all engineering disciplines, integration with best-in-class Cadence signoff-level simulation and analysis products, and greater layout performance.

Engineers today increasingly must design and collaborate across multiple domains, including electromagnetic (EM), thermal, signal and power integrity (SI/PI), and logical/physical implementation. The Allegro X platform’s simplified user interaction model delivers quick technology access and immediate value for novice and expert users. By minimizing iterations and providing access to both the logical and physical domains simultaneously with concurrent collaboration capabilities across schematic, layout and analysis activities, the Allegro X platform reduces the time and effort to complete the design of complex systems by up to 4X compared to legacy design tools.

The Allegro X platform leverages a hybrid cloud solution that provides scalable compute resources and full technology access while reducing deployment footprints and complexity. With the Allegro X platform, engineers can now deliver high-quality designs with access to the Cadence Clarity 3D Solver, Celsius Thermal Solver, Sigrity technology and PSpice for simulation and analysis, Allegro Pulse for design data management, and interoperability with the AWR Microwave Office RF design flow.

The Allegro X platform delivers significant improvement in design throughput and performance. By leveraging GPU technology in combination with core architectural optimization, Allegro X performance is accelerated across a wide range of operations. In addition, the Allegro X platform utilizes cloud resources to synthesize full or partial PCB designs. Innovative machine learning (ML) techniques concurrently optimize the design for manufacturing, SI and PI requirements while designing the power delivery network (PDN), device placement and signal interconnect as specified by the system architect/electrical engineer.

Tom Beckley, senior vice president and general manager of the Custom IC & PCB Group at Cadence said that the Allegro X platform establishes a unified engineering platform, boosting overall design team productivity up to 4X. Engineers now have a framework for logical and physical design, in 2D or 3D, single- or multi-board, that allows them to optimize resources even on the most complex 5G designs, enabled by interoperability with the AWR Microwave Office RF design flow. He also said that Cadence R&D has been working diligently with academia and industry partners on groundbreaking, analysis-driven PCB synthesis that significantly enhances design productivity.

Greg Bodi, Director of PCB layout engineering at NVIDIA said that harnessing the power of accelerated computing by using NVIDIA GPUs enables Cadence’s Allegro X platform to boost performance up to 20X for interactive operations. He also said that this performance improvement delivers their engineers' immediate canvas responsiveness and acceleration when 2D rendering complex boards during the design phase.

Dr. Tomas Palacios, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT said that multi-objective optimization is a challenging problem and he is pleased that MIT students and alumni have made significant progress working inside Cadence on novel ML solutions towards the synthesis of difficult PCB designs. The resulting system will not only benefit MIT but will also significantly improve productivity in the PCB community at large.

The Allegro X Platform supports Cadence’s Intelligent System Design strategy, which enables customers to accelerate system innovation. The new platform will be available for general release in the fourth quarter of 2021.