EW – Design Edition – Altium PCB Design Software, Cadence Timing Signoff Tools and More

New products from Altium, Arm, Cadence, Digi-Key and Imagination Technologies.

Altium Designer 19

Designer 19. (Image courtesy of Altium.)

Designer 19. (Image courtesy of Altium.)

Altium released Designer 19, the latest version of the company’s PCB design software. Altium Designer 19 introduces new features that make designing complex, high-quality projects easier, and expands upon features released in Altium Designer 18 such as a modern graphical user interface, multiboard functionality and a redesigned bill of materials (BOM) management system.

Additionally, Designer 19 uses EDA technologies with a focus on elevating the user experience. New capabilities that accurately model high-density interconnect structures give designers increased confidence when manufacturing high-density boards.

For more information, visit Altium’s website.

Arm Autonomous Driving Technology

Cortex-A65AE. (Image courtesy of Arm.)

Cortex-A65AE. (Image courtesy of Arm.)

Arm has introduced the latest addition to its Arm Safety Ready program, an Automotive Enhanced processor designed to help create safe next-generation driver experiences. Optimized for 7nm, Cortex-A65AE is Arm’s first multithreaded processor with integrated safety for handling sensor data in autonomous and high throughput needs in IVI/cockpit systems.

The Cortex-A65AE is suited for managing the throughput requirement for gathering sensor data and can be used in lock-step mode connected to accelerators, such as ML or computer vision, to help process the data efficiently.

For more information, visit Arm’s website.

Cadence Timing Signoff Tools

Quantus Extraction Solution. (Image courtesy of Cadence.)

Quantus Extraction Solution. (Image courtesy of Cadence.)

Cadence collaborated with MaxLinear to create the MxL935xx Telluride device, a 400Gbps PAM4 system on chip (SoC) using 16FF process technology. The Cadence Quantus Extraction Solution and Tempus Timing Signoff Solution were used during development. The Telluride device is a key component for system vendors to be able to develop a 400Gbps optical interconnect module in a compact form factor for intra-datacenter applications with a transmission distance of up to 2km.

For more information, visit Cadence’s website.

Digi-Key IoT Studio

IoT Studio. (Image courtesy of Digi-Key.)

IoT Studio. (Image courtesy of Digi-Key.)

Digi-Key launched a design tool called IoT Studio. It is an integrated development environment (IDE) that aims to provide a simple way for developers and providers to create IoT systems. The software allows users to quickly move from an idea to a prototype without writing any code.

The tool, developed in partnership with Atmosphere IoT, has an intuitive user interface along with drag-and-drop functionality. Dragging sensors, processors and other library elements and then dropping them onto the design panel allows a user to make connections, collect data and send it to a mobile device or the cloud. IoT Studio also generates the embedded code, firmware, as well as the Web and mobile application code.

For more information, visit Digi-Key’s website.

Imagination Technologies Neural Network Accelerator

(Image courtesy of Imagination Technologies.)

(Image courtesy of Imagination Technologies.)

Imagination Technologies unveiled PowerVR Series3NX, its latest neural network accelerator (NNA) architecture. Series3NX provides an increased level of scalability, allowing SoC manufacturers to optimize compute power and performance across a range of embedded industries such as automotive, mobile, smart surveillance and IoT edge devices.

A single Series3NX core scales from 0.6 to 10 tera operations per second (TOPS) while multicore implementations can scale beyond 160 TOPS. Thanks to architectural enhancements, including lossless weight compression, the Series3NX architecture benefits from a 40 percent boost in performance in the same silicon area over the previous generation.

For more information, visit Imagination’s website.

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