Simulation-driven design holds great promise for delivering smarter products, shortening time to market, and enhancing product design.

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Written by: Sarmad Khemmoro, VP, Electronics Technical Business Development at Altair

The ever-increasing pace of innovation in the electronics industry has pushed manufacturers to explore modern approaches to electronic system design to gain a competitive edge. Simulation-driven design holds great promise for delivering smarter products, shortening time to market and enhancing product design, but it can be difficult to identify a clear roadmap to fully leverage the benefits of this digital approach to product development.

We can look to pioneers and early-adopters of simulation in the electronics industry for insights and inspiration. The five industry leaders below demonstrate different ways that a simulation-driven design philosophy enables engineers to accelerate printed circuit board (PCB) development and testing, gain insights from multi-disciplinary system simulation, leverage the power of cloud computing and develop IoT platforms for smart, connected devices.

Samsung SDI: Improving PCB Development

Samsung SDI, headquartered in South Korea, is a global market leader in the high technology and environmental battery industry. Samsung SDI has a 40-year history of developing a wide range of products, but when they transitioned to the electronic materials business, the company had to move from digital display control circuits to battery control circuits, requiring a different approach to new electronic designs and related PCB manufacturing technologies. Samsung SDI needed a solution that could set up and deploy PCB design review and verification where the design rules and user environment were centrally managed.

To facilitate this PCB development process overhaul, Samsung SDI looked to Altair PollEx, a tool for accelerating electronic system development from design to manufacturing. PollEx allowed teams of PCB designers, hardware engineers, test engineers and manufacturing engineers to communicate overseas, but still allow the design rules and verification environment to be centrally managed.

Altair worked closely with Samsung SDI engineers to ensure the PCB verification solution could be used for existing and new products with different verification requirements. Thanks to PollEx, after two months Samsung SDI had an efficient collaboration environment with PCB verification capabilities that could be used by multiple teams. With this environment in place, PCB artwork engineers could upload PCB layout designs to a PDM server, including the designs in PollEx’s format. All engineers could then review the PCB designs while running PCB verification.

With PollEx, Samsung SDI successfully collaborates from a central solution with PCB design review and verification capabilities. This saves an estimated six million USD a year thanks to a reduction of design iterations from 20 to nine and number of revision checks from six to three.

Learn more about how Samsung SDI improved their PCB development process.

Annapurna Labs: Rapid Chip Design in the Cloud

Annapurna Labs was established as a fabless chip start-up in 2011, focused on bringing innovation to the fast-growing cloud infrastructure. Four years after its inception, Annapurna Labs was acquired by Amazon Web Services (AWS). Since then, Annapurna Labs has accelerated its innovation by developing a range of products that benefit cloud customers.

As a chip design company, time-to-market and engineering efficiency are Annapurna Labs’ most critical and expensive metrics. With this in mind, the team selected the Altair Accelerator job scheduler for their front-end and back-end workflows. The team was managing workloads on a number of dedicated Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances, and they could occasionally scale up by manually adding new On-Demand instances.

However, the process was not automated and led to high touch, inefficiency, forgotten unused compute resources and either under-scaling or excessive scaling. The Rapid Scaling feature within Accelerator added structure and efficiency to scaling AWS compute resources, shortening time to results and changing the development model to Continuous Integration.

With the installation of Rapid Scaling, Annapurna Labs has reduced its cost by at least 50 percent. Additionally, with Rapid Scaling now part of Annapurna Labs’ chip development Continuous Integration flow, they are seeing faster incremental development and continuous regression. Annapurna Labs keeps tighter control on costs and benefits from a detailed view into resource usage by projects and users.

Learn more about Annapurna Labs accelerating their chip design process.

Motorola Mobility: Optimizing Motor and Actuator Design

Motorola Mobility is one of the founding companies of the mobile communication industry. The highly competitive consumer device industry has quick time-to-market deadlines, which necessitates the use of simulation technology to streamline design cycles.

Smartphone cameras use voice coil motor (VCM) actuators to translate a lens in three degrees of freedom in order to bring an object to focus on the image plane and to optically stabilize the camera. To ensure optimal design, the Motorola Mobility team selected Altair Flux to simulate the entire VCM and camera system. Flux allowed the team to quickly validate designs and ensure that the part compatibility and camera performance met the design targets. Other devices within the phone, such as speakers, antenna shields, accessory magnets etc. can affect the VCM performance due to magnetic interference. With Flux, the team simulated the entire VCM and phone layout, accounting for all possible magnetic interference from other devices.

Flux shortened design cycles, giving Motorola Mobility access to quick and reliable answers as well as design integrity checks to detect issues that otherwise would not be found until parts are tooled. This cut the design time from weeks and months to days and hours, allowing the Motorola Mobility team to remain agile and quickly iterate on designs.

Learn more about optimizing motor designs at Motorola.

Schneider Electric: System-level Insights

Schneider Electric is a leader in the digital transformation of energy management and automation in homes, buildings, data centers, infrastructure and industries. Their power management, automation systems and IoT-enabled solutions help customers better manage their energy systems to achieve higher energy efficiency and sustainability.

Pursuing a new circuit breaker business in a new geographic location, Schneider Electric had to develop a product variant that would meet all-new specifications, including operating conditions which differed from the standard operation, involving different voltage levels and types (DC rather than AC). Since the window of opportunity was short, the challenge was to develop a viable product within only four months. Schneider Electric turned to simulation technology to speed the process and meet the development deadline.

Altair’s flexible access to a wider range of CAE tools came in handy as electromagnetic, mechanic, control strategy and other requirements needed to be considered at the same time. This multi-disciplinary design approach – based on use of Altair Flux, Altair MotionSolve and Altair Activate together, including through co-simulation – allowed Schneider Electric engineers to evaluate numerous variants and identify the optimal design parameters for the various operating conditions.

The multi-disciplinary approach allowed Schneider Electric to identify technical risks early, find solutions that met their requirements and ultimately achieve their ambitious time-to-market goal.

Learn more about Schneider Electric’s use of multi-disciplinary system simulation.

Toggled iQ: Leveraging an IoT Platform for Continued Development of Smart Connected Products

Smart products can deliver many benefits—recurring revenue, data-driven product decisions, post-launch feature updates, new user experiences and many more. However, developing the product technically and maintaining it can be challenging.

Established in 2007 as a pioneer in direct-wire LED lighting technology, Toggled products are based on intellectual property for the direct replacement of fluorescent light tubes with light-emitting diode (LED) lamps. This smart-lighting manufacturer wanted to develop a new, connected lighting and building management solution to help their customers save money, improve comfort and comply with new regulations. Their Toggled iQ smart building data and device management system combines web application, mobile application, hardware, analytics and edge computing to create a one-of-a-kind smart building data and device management system.

They used Altair SmartWorks IoT to build a complete front end, back end and edge compute architecture. With this, Toggled’s customers can now manage users, onboard devices, manage compute workloads in their gateway product, develop building automation and optimize energy usage.

To learn more about how to apply simulation-driven methods to electronics design, visit altair.com/electronics.