Behind the Design: Visteon®, India

This is the thirteenth post in a series showcasing the winners of the 2014 Technology Leadership Awards. View the previous ones here.

Runner up in the Transportation & Automotive category: Visteon, India.

Design: BA Cluster

Design team: Nagarajan Mani

Design challenges:

• High-density placement of electronic components because of three to four different variants of passenger cars
• Primary challenges: save cost and meet automotive standards of EMC requirements and manufacturability
• EMC requirements were successfully achieved within a two layer board; having so many components with this routing density was a remarkable achievement for this design
• Thermal test passed with both sides populated with heat generating components

Design tools and team comments:

• Xpedition® Enterprise
• Constraint Manager used to make customer-specified requirement which was critical from normal practice of design. It was used to make this design possible on a two layer board and it helped a lot in routing the critical signals with GND guards.
• Valor was used to ensure the design met all the requirements of suppliers and board manufacturing feasibility in first level development. This allowed us to avoid multiple iterations in DFM.

Judges’ comments:

• An impressive two layer design with dense routing and use of variants.
• Good job to fit into two layers. Power distribution would have been difficult, and EMC issues difficult to suppress.

About the Technology Leadership Awards

Started in 1988, this program is the longest running competition of its kind in the electronic design automation (EDA) industry. It recognizes engineers and designers who use innovative methods and design tools to address today’s complex PCB systems design challenges and produce industry-leading products. See the full list of 2014 winners here.