Cadence Launches Cloud AI Tool to Shrink PCB Placement and Routing Times

Artificial intelligence (AI) is everywhere these days, and Cadence Design Systems is now applying it in the PCB design space. Yesterday, the company announced its new Allegro X AI technology.

In today’s electronics engineering, AI has clearly moved to center stage. We’ve seen it recently in everything from IC design to live streaming acceleration. For its part, Cadence is applying AI to PBC placement and routing. Allegro X AI is cloud-based and is built on and accessed through the company’s Allegro X Design Platform.

In this article we explore what the use of AI means for PCB design, we examine the key features of Cadence’s new tool, and we share insights from our interview with Saugat Sen, vice president of product marketing at Cadence.

 

From Manual Tasks to Automation

Sen points out that, unlike IC design, PCB design has remained a classically manual-intensive task, and has been a serial process. “As designs became more and more complex, this process of PCB design has been progressively becoming more time consuming,” says Sen. “Placement is a significant part of what’s taking days of a designer's time in this end to end process. And it’s the same for routing.”

 

Doing manual placement and routing in PCB designs remains one the biggest time bottlenecks.

 

Allegro X AI borrows an idea from IC design in that IC design typically begins with a netlist and design constraints which then must be satisfied in the generated IC layout. Using Allegro X AI, PCB designers supply a variety of inputs including stackup, board outline, netlist, physical constraints, and more. The output from Allegro X AI provides the power planes, board placement, critical routing, and so on.

 

Allegro X AI inputs PCB design information such as netlist and physical contraints, and outputs board placement, crtical routing, and more.

 

“The AI engine essentially uses the scalability of the cloud to provide the computational power that's required to deliver these results,” says Sen.

 

”It's not AI alone because the engine blends the classical computational algorithms used in traditional physical design with the contemporary AI techniques to deliver these results.”

 

Multiple Benefits of AI Technology

The benefits of using Allegro X AI technology are many, according to Sen. First, there is improved productivity. Sen says that using AI like this boosts a PCB designer's productivity by ten times. Next, there’s an increase in quality. Placement automation using generative AI enables feasibility analysis in the early phases of design, he says.

Meanwhile, AI lets designers explore a much larger solution space than what is possible through manual methods, says Sen. This drives the optimization of metrics such as shorter wire lengths while adhering to the design constraints. Finally, Allegro X AI replaces “rule-of-thumb” kinds of design flow techniques with a physics-based approach that’s guided by both constraints and built-it analysis.

Allegro X AI is aimed at PCB placement and routing for small-to-medium-sized designs. While the Allegro X AI tool is cloud-based, Sen explains that it is accessed through Allegro X Design Platform, which is not cloud-based.

 

Real-world Time Reduction Results

According to Sen, several early testing customers have reported significant results using Allegro X AI. One unnamed customer had a PCB design that took three days to do PCB placements using manual human methods, but only 75 minutes to do placement on the same PCB design using Allegro X AI Global Placement. Interestingly, the AI generated design also provided a 14% improvement in wire length.

 

An early Allegro X AI customer was able to perform PCB placement in 75 minutes for a design that took 3 days using human placement.

 

While the above example is a customer that chose not to reveal its name, Cadence has received public endorsements of Allegro X AI from a number of customers, including engineers at Schneider Electric, Kioxia, and Velux.

 

The Self-Driving Cars Analogy

The fact that generative AI tools such as ChatGPT are a major topic in the news today is actually just a coincidence in terms of Cadence’s adoption of this kind of technology. “It's serendipitous that generative AI is so much in the news today,” says Sen. “This is an effort we started some years back and the fruits of it is what we’re now announcing.”

A move to generative AI-based PCB design is analogous to the progression toward self-driving cars.

 

While Sen admits that a comparison between AI-enhanced PCB design and autonomous driving isn’t a perfect analogy, it’s a vivid way to look at Allegro X AI. Just as manual driving progressed to ADAS (advanced driver assistance systems) to self-driving cars, manual PCB was enhanced by constraint-driven PCB design. And now the next step is generative AI-based PCB design using technology like Allegro X AI.

 

All images used courtesy of Cadence