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Advanced tools aren’t everything: optimizing electronics design workflows

Electronics design is challenging not only from a technical perspective; workflow practices and organizational culture can also stand in the way of efficiency and success, even when using advanced tools.

At the May 2024 User2User event, which brought together Siemens EDA users from across different industries for a day of learning and connecting, customers also presented use cases demonstrating the need to consider how software is used within the company and optimize work processes.

Pushing for global adoption

How do you get hundreds of new users to use the Xpedition flow?

This was the challenge faced by Philips, which had been using the Xpedition flow for PCBA design for almost 15 years, but it was not used globally within the enterprise until four years ago. Regulatory requirements made it even more complicated for the business units involved in developing medical devices.

Bogdan Filipov, ECAD Application & Support Engineer at Philips, shared how they rolled out a global training program to help business units smoothly shift to the new system, with over 500 active users currently using the common Xpedition platform.

Design for Excellence: the ELT approach

Design for manufacturing, design for testing, design for maintainability, and more – there are many branches that can be included in the Design for Excellence approach implemented by ELT group.

Marco Pietrobono, Head of PCB & DDP Management, explains how ELT merged branches to improve efficiency and manageability, and integrated DFX into procurement and testing processes.

How can IPC standards be used in the electronics design workflow?

Until now, IPC standards have been difficult to translate into real design requirements that can be used in the DFM process. That’s why IPC collaborated with Siemens to extract the design requirements from their standards and establish a generic rule set for DFM.

This is where PCBflow comes in: based on the design requirements, IPC created 9 “manufacturing profiles” within PCBflow, which can be used to run DFM checks. In this lecture, senior IPC director Hans-Peter Tranitz presents IPC design initiatives and Paul Carpine from Siemens demonstrates how these DFM profiles can be accessed and used in PCBflow – and in Xpedition too.

Learn more about how Siemens software is leveraged by customers, from use cases focusing on unique electronics design challenges.

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This article first appeared on the Siemens Digital Industries Software blog at https://blogs.sw.siemens.com/electronic-systems-design/2024/09/26/advanced-tools-arent-everything-optimizing-electronics-design-workflows/