Smart System Designer Datasheet

Challenges for Smart System Designer

With Moore’s law in effect for decades, the silicon density has been doubling every 18 to 24 months. As a result, silicon companies have been adding more functionality into their ICs which makes designing-in these ICs more challenging and time consuming for the systems designers. The complexities have been increasing but the aids the semiconductor companies provide to the systems designers to design-in the new ICs remain the same as in 1980s.

  •  Datasheets
  • Reference Designs (Schematics, Board layout)
  • Board Kits
With increasing functionality and complexities, the size of datasheet is increasing and so is the time spent by system designers in digesting the information in the voluminous design guides. System and subsystem design has remained largely a manual process, particularly at the early stages of the design. Once the parts are selected, the traditional EDA design tools provide tools for entering/capturing the schematics graphically and automation for the physical layout design process.
 

Additionally, the traditional PCB design tools provide a bottom up part search approach, that does not provide any help to the system designer in selecting the right software and hardware develop stacks:

  • Boot code, debuggers, drivers for Processors
  • Physical protocol for peripherals such as PCI Express
  • FLASH

Challenges for Semiconductor Companies

Semiconductor companies who are promoting highly integrated, complex ICs must deal with a few additional challenges to secure socket wins

  • How to get differentiated intelligence out to system designers
  • Figure out how/why system designers pick some parts over others
  • How to accelerate the design-in to win business sooner rather than later

Semiconductor companies do a lot of the work to test and validate the highly integrated, complex ICs using EDA tools. They then take their learnings and design guidance developed internally and put it in design guides (PDFs). The work they do does not benefit the system designers. System designers then must read, interpret and reapply the learnings to their design and enter a lot of information into their PCB design tools manually

Most system designers, especially those that are designing products for a long life cycle, have to work with multiple distributors tools, semiconductor websites to find a part that meets their needs. Once they find a part they think might fit the need, they have to then search for software ecosystems that meet their long life cycle needs. This is a manual, disjointed approach that is similar to what they used in the 20th century!

Anew-DA’s Smart System Designer approach

Smart System Designer from Anew Design Automation addresses the unfulfilled need in the PCB design space using AI/ML techniques to help system designers:

  • Do system design at higher sub-system and system level
  • Develop a BOM for the system that meets system requirements (such as reliability, supply chain, performance, power, cost as well as future needs)
  • Integrate software needs during sub-system and part selection process to ensure that the right software, hardware stacks are chosen for the life of the system
  • Provide one consistent user interface for creating a BOM that meets system requirements for long life cycle products

With Smart System Designer, users can work at a sub-system level to accelerate system design process. It supports over 100 attributes for each part in the subsystem in following categories:

  • Parametric, lifecycle, environmental, electrical, supply chain
  • ECAD, design resources, package data
  • Software implications, Soft/Hard IP (for FPGAs), as well as
  • attributes in part application area

Smart System Designer supports applications and sub-systems in Medical, Telecom, Industrial Automation, Aerospace and Defense, Vertical Market Segments. It uses AI/ML techniques to provide pertinent information to the system designer in one place.

Anew Design Automation uses AI/ML to manage electronics supply chain volatility

Hear CEO Sathyam Pattanam and Faiq Fazal, VP Engineering, speak to the data science behind Anew’s Smart System Designer through this On-Demand Webinar.

Anew Design Automation maximizes product lifetime profitability to its customers using Vertica and machine learning. AI-driven electronics engineering helps not only system designers replace parts immediately, Anew’s solution employs predictive analytics that guide designers to select parts that are optimized for supply chain and functionality evolvability while accelerating the design process. This holistic sourcing approach is an unfulfilled need that Anew is meeting in vertical markets like medical, automotive and telecom. Anew-DA Vertica Joint Webinar

Benefits

Smart System Designer working at a higher level enables the system designer to accelerate the design process. With its AI/ML based system engineering, users can eliminate manual system development processes, ensure that the BOM meets system needs for a long-life cycle. It enables system designers to choose the optimal parts for the sub-system while ensuring that they have chosen the right software and hardware stacks for their system.

With Smart System Designer, Semiconductor companies can get visibility into how system designers choose parts, leverage their design and test intelligence to help system designers design-in parts faster, provide differentiated intelligence to system designers and have an opportunity to design-in subsystems using their parts instead of a single part.

For more information or to see a demo of Smart System Designer, contact us