Board Station XE® - PCB Design Flow

Board Station XE® - PCB Design Flow Description:

A large-scale PCB design flow - particularly targeted at yielding better time-to-market and improving productivity.

Board Station XE (BSXE) gives Board Station customers quick and easy access to the most advanced PCB layout technology available.

A Tightly Integrated Systems Design Flow

The Board Station® design flow is well known for its ability to help companies create leading-edge, complex PCB designs in large enterprise environments. The Board Station XE flow is a new platform for Board Station customers to meet the increasing technological and time-tomarket demands of today’s electronics market.

Board Station XE is the next major upgrade - or evolution - of the Board Station flow. It delivers the highest level of layout design productivity in the industry and does so by using AutoActive® - a modern software technology for PCB layout. Board Station XE enables customers to design today’s most complex electronic products. Board Station XE delivers innovative technologies, such as XtremePCB™, to improve design productivity while minimizing the costs and risks normally associated with adapting new technology.

Board Station XE does this by coexisting with the current Board Station design flow. It uses a common library and front-end tools for both flows.

Board Station XE is based on a single, modern PCB design architecture. It utilizes existing Board Station libraries and existing front-end tools including: Librarian, Design Architect®or Board Architect™ and LMS.

There are a number of benefits of using Board Station XE, including:

• Protects customers investments by allowing them to continue using their data, libraries and existing front-end and library management tools
• Delivers improved design productivity through the AutoActive environment used in Board Station XE and FabLink XE
• Mitigates the risk of changing flows by providing access to more functionality and productivity faster
• Provides dramatic improvements, such as better front and back-end integration, ease of use and increased performance
• Makes it easy to adopt since it uses current Board Station licenses

Systems Design with Board Station XE

When you're designing a product, you need more than just a great PCB layout tool - you need a tightly integrated design system. Board Station XE provides this high level of integration, enabling all members of the design team to work more efficiently, thereby speeding up the design process.

Integration of Board Station XE for layout with Board Architect facilitates a seamless transfer of rules and data between the schematic and layout environments. As a project evolves from concept through to finished product, the database is always kept in synchronization, notifying the engineer and designer of changes as they occur and eliminating unnecessary and costly design iterations.

Board Station XE is integrated with DMS (Data Management System), providing a central infrastructure for component libraries, design data versioning and management, design reuse, where used, and integration with corporate PLM systems. Once the design is complete, integration with manufacturing output tools ensures that the integrity of the design is maintained.

“We’ve been evaluating Board Station XE for a few months now and really like what we see. We are particularly looking forward to getting access to the new functionality so as to shorten design cycle times, improve productivity, reduce production costs, and develop PCBs with new functionality, such as embedded passives.” - Mick Harvey, principal hardware engineer, SELEX Sensors and Airborne Systems