One of the Aberdeen reports said that (I'm paraphrasing here) "One of the core requirements to having a robust E-CAD system is having a good PCB library". The Mentor library tools make this difficult. Here are some examples:
- Mentor now has 3 symbol editors, the New Symbol Editor, the FPGA Symbol Editor and IO Designer. Now our librarians need to learn at least 3 different tools to build symbols depending on the type of part. None of these tools can easily create a large pin count ICs (other than FPGAs and ASICs) that can handle fractures and keep track of the pins between the fractures. None of these tools can mine the pin data from a vendor's component specification PDF file.
- There are 2 cell editors, the Cell Editor (which is basically Expedition) and the LP Wizard. Again the librarians have to learn 2 different tools to build cells depending on the type of cell being created. Anything built using the LP Wizard must be brought into the Cell Editor to be finished. More tools for the librarians to use.
- One of the keys to using CES is having a good model library. Mentor has no tools in this area that make it easy for users to add IBIS models to the library to support CES.
- There are also no tools to add SystemVision models to our parts in our library.
All these different tools make it much more difficult for librarians to create library parts. In our environment we add on average 300 parts a month to our library. Our librarians need one robust tool to create library parts, both in the netlist flow and the Expedition flow. In my opinion, because Mentor has no one group in SDD responsible for librarian tools, all we have now is a bunch of point tools that address certain types of parts. Mentor needs to get organized, quit the infighting between the different factions and quickly come up with a strategy to address this issue.
Do any other companies have this problem?
Thanks for listening,
Tony