Electrical Design to PLM Automation

Full Transcript Below:

Heatherly Bucher

Hello and welcome to our session, Electrical Design to PLM Automation: Connecting OrCAD Cadence and Arena where you’ll learn how smooth and efficient processes from electrical design to product to release can supercharge your design efforts, reducing costs, and improving quality as your team works with other engineering teams, your supply chain, and manufacturing.

I’m joined by Roger Chin of EMA Design Automations and Chuck McGinley of Arena a PTC business. I’m Heatherly Bucher and I’ll be the host today as we explore this topic.

Roger, you are an Application Engineer at EMA with a wealth of background in this area. Could you tell us a bit about your experience?

Roger Chin

Great to speak with you, Heatherly. Yes, I’m Roger. I’ve been at EMA since 2013 and I work with our schematic tool, our simulation, and more and more with data management as we relate to today.

Yeah, what we’re seeing more and more of our customers is the amount of time that our engineers have to spend outside of the schematic canvas. You’re dealing with parts, you’re dealing with part numbers, part data BOMs, all that is a integral part of a designer’s day and things that really have grown onto the engineer’s plate.

So I think what we’ll show today will really help in that side.

Heatherly Bucher

Great. Thanks, Roger. And Chuck, you are a Senior Customer Success Coach for Arena customers. Can you share a bit about your background in the EDA world?

Chuck McGinley

Sure, thanks, Heatherly. My name’s Chuck McGinley. As Heatherly mentioned. I’m a Senior Customer Success Coach here at Arena PTC. And my background is in electrical design, electrical engineering. The first 15 years of my existence out of school, I worked at MIT Lincoln Laboratory doing PCB designs, FPGA designs for radar systems and optic systems for the military.

I left MIT to start a company with some friends named Omnify software, which was acquired by Arena in 2018. And I came along in that acquisition where I started my journey with Arena as a customer success coach. And it’s my job to teach folks best practices, configurations set up, and I leverage all of the design background I have when connecting the two systems to help people through the different challenges they might have with configurations set up, what’s good to have in either system, and how to implement all of that.

Heatherly Bucher

Thank you, Chuck. Oh, my goodness. You have a wealth of background. I didn’t know about MIT. That’s exciting. We’ll have to talk later. For our listeners today, I lead alliances and partnerships for Arena.

Arena has partnered with EMA design Automations for over 10 years to ensure that customers utilizing cadence design tools can benefit from automated process flows between Cadence platforms and Arena. We’re excited to bring this conversation to you today with EMA. Today we’ll discuss the challenges and risks and electrical design throughout the lifecycle of the product, connect the dots between electrical design automation and product release processes, and explore how Arena and EMA customers connect Arena and Cadence platforms and the benefits this fast, easy connection provides with a short demo by Roger Thronen.

So let’s get started. Before we start looking at EDA PLM integrations, I think it’s good to consider the challenges to the overall electrical design processes and indeed the entire product design and delivery lifecycle. Almost everything in our work world today is digital and physical products rely on ever-increasing amounts of data to be produced, delivered, and serviced.

Data that is coming from many systems and people stretched across the product lifecycle. Connecting all this data into a product digital thread is important—the innovation, flexibility to respond to change and overall company success. In a recent survey conducted by Tech-Clarity, 69% of manufacturing companies listed system integrations as critical or important.

Given this background, let’s talk about why it’s important to connect systems, specifically electrical design, to PLM. So Roger and Chuck, let’s talk about when things aren’t connected. What does it look like if EDA systems and PLM platforms are not integrated? Roger, what are the risks and pain points that you’ve seen?

Roger Chin

Yeah, Heatherly, I mean, the absolute worst case, right? Is if you get a board respin, right? Your engineer does the work, the validation, the verification of the board, the connections that they pick the right parts, meet the right specs, meet your design goals, you do all of that work, you get the BOM out. And then it turns out that the BOM you send out might be using not only the wrong parts or have the wrong number of parts, the wrong tolerance, all of those things that you don’t catch for in the design side.

If it sneaks in there, you can create a whole respin and significant delays to your design cycle. And that’s something that we’ve actually seen from customers. This is real events that we hear from customers that prompted the foundation of this integration between OrCAD and Arena.

Heatherly Bucher

No, that’s great. So definitely time delays. Now, Chuck, we were talking before and you also shared with me about the cleanup processes. When systems aren’t connected, what do the cleanup processes look like and who has to do it?

Chuck McGinley

So I’m making air quotes right now. Back in the old days, the pain process of getting part numbers into the bill of materials because as an engineer you think about manufacturer part number, right?

That’s the key to you. You qualify the manufacturer part, that’s the one you want to use, but the corporation has to build this product so we all get paid and we want to do that in a very painless, time-efficient process. So getting a corporate part number, linking that data together, linking the documentation together as well for the assembly is very key. And in the old days, we used to throw that over the wall and somebody in dark control would clean it up and it’s a very time-consuming, error-prone process where there’s a lot of communication back and forth.

It would be great if the engineer could just stay in their environment, get a new part number, add the vendor manufacturer part information to that, and it all just flows through the system. So when the bill of materials comes out, there is no cleanup. It’s all correct by design.

Roger Chin

That’s a great point, Chuck, because coming from our side at EMA, and I’m sure you have the same experience as an engineer, you feel safe in the tools you know. It’s hard to leave ORCAD and go somewhere else to…

Once every couple months, to put in a new BOM. You want to be able to do everything inside the tool that well and that you trust.

Chuck McGinley

Agreed.

Heatherly Bucher

Yeah. And what about delivery of board information to the contract manufacturers? What does that process look like when systems aren’t connected What are the dangers?

Chuck McGinley

Yeah, a lot of times it’s emails and files going back and forth. You sent the wrong file, they call you up, and then you have to send the new file. Guess what? Three days have passed, right? And you don’t want that to happen. By integrating your suppliers into the system and having the engineers publish the data directly into the bills of materials and change orders, all of the data’s correct by design and it just flows up.

You generate your Gerbers, your schematic files, all of the things needed to manufacture the initial boards, and nobody is passing files back and forth. The supplier comes in when the files are new, they review them and approve it, and all of the communication is there historically in the system. So you can see when people have looked and reviewed things and signed off on them, and again, the engineer can just push the information from their systems into the PLM.

Heatherly Bucher

Oh, that’s great. Go ahead, Roger.

Roger Chin

No. Yeah, that’s a great point, Chuck. And I think for our perspective, when our customers… When we talk to them, a big concern is, hey, we need to get parts on our schematic, right?

We need to build things quickly, research parts, and just build our design. Engineers hate waiting for either the librarians or somebody else to have them manage the part numbers, get a corporate part number, get all the stuff that they feel are not directly related to the design and that might slow down their design process.

They want to just go, go, go, right? So being able to do that from OrCAD, find the part you want, like you said, hand off that part to somebody else, get the part number, and then you have all of that history track—it makes it so much more seamless and like you said, emails, things being sent back and forth, having many more layers of complications.

Chuck McGinley

And the age-old adage, everybody hates paperwork. If we can make it electronic and quick, so much the better.

Heatherly Bucher

So true. No, that’s great. And looking at the costs of not connecting systems, and we talked about the data errors, time delays, and team efficiencies. I think going back to that tech clarity report that we started the session with, what’s interesting to me is when asked to identify the value of connecting the systems data and processes that are in the digital product thread, if you will, companies identify product quality as the most critical goal with almost 70% valuing product quality as a goal that connection will help with.

But what’s interesting to me is if you look at the rest of the results, the other goals that the companies valued highly, a lot of them are around efficiencies, various measures of efficiency.

So Roger and Chuck, everything that you just mentioned, I think we see captured or justified in the survey, this recent survey by Tech-Clarity. So let’s take a look at what it looks like when systems are connected, when they are integrated, specifically EDA and PLM. If we take these company goals and translate them to engineering processes and teams, what values and benefits have you both seen? And Roger, we’ll start with you and kind of talk through what does it look like when things are connected?

Roger Chin

Awesome, Heatherly. Yeah, so our expertise on the OrCAD side, nowadays more and more of our customers have to have a database for the EDA world.

You have properties that are unique to your components. You have different tables, different parts, and you need the ability to quickly add parts and assign schematic symbols, layout footprints, 3D models—all of those different things are tied into a well-functioning OrCAD database. So what we have found is that having that database as the foundation for your design flow and giving it the ability to connect to a trusted source and be able to pull part numbers from a source like Arena is huge.

And that’s what we’re seeing here, that you have your Arena data and then that data flows right into the OrCAD side, and then the engineers can hand off data from the OrCAD CIP database right up into Arena as well.

And it’s just like one seamless flow back and forth, and you have a lot of checks and balances put into that process so that your team doesn’t have to worry about putting in duplicate part numbers, don’t have to worry about which fields to copy and paste. As Chuck mentioned, we’re trying to really get rid of the paperwork, the emails, and just make it so that you can do it right inside the tool.

Chuck McGinley

Yeah, I would just add a couple of minor things and that is AVL management becomes much easier. Part change notifications becomes easier because with the two systems tied together, you’re going to get where used and things of that nature and the bills of materials.

And in general, in the PLM system where you have the engineers and their design tools, the PLM EMA Bridge helps communication between supply chain and the engineers themselves as the supply chain people get risk notifications or notifications of end of life of parts—that communication process can be done in AVL changes very quickly. And having that tied, the two systems tied together, allows you to quickly go out and research and generate a new replacement for that item and merge that into the bill of materials during the AVL change process.

Roger Chin

Yeah, that’s a great point. And that collaboration is really enhanced here because as you mentioned, different users see different sides of this whole scheme, right? The engineer, they spend most of their time in OrCAD, they might think, “Hey, this is a good part to use. This part might fit my design specs.” But they might not be the ones considering the inventory, the end of life, the compliance, all of those things that are tied together.
They might get a start on it, but they can say, “Hey, I’m interested in using this part,” request an Arena part number for it, and then your other teams can work on it in the Arena PLM side and then that data would flow back if the AML, as you mentioned, changes.

Any kind of fields you want to map between the Arena side can flow right back into the OrCAD side.

Heatherly Bucher

That’s a great point, Roger. I think recognizing that teams have a different… Each team has a different place, right?

In this process, and like you said, they see the product lifecycle process from their perspective, right? And so the transparency that comes when we connect systems and are able to support the processes across systems and flow certain data across systems is immense, like you said, and being able to collaborate in that way.

Chuck, I wanted to… You guys talked about new part creation and getting a corporate part number when you’re in an OrCAD, the convenience of it, but it’s really, it’s more than convenience. I think, Chuck, when we were preparing, you talked a bit about part proliferation and how that can negatively impact the business. Can you share a bit about that?

Chuck McGinley

Yeah. It’s kind of funny when customers… I’ve seen customers share their AVLs with their contract manufacturers. Because a lot of times they’ll purchase boards by the board part number from the CM, and the CM wants to see their AVL up front, right? So that communication process through PLM is greatly enhanced and approved. But sometimes the CMs will look at an AVL and see, “Hey, why do we have 13 different 10K 1206 resistors in here?”

And that’s because prior to having these systems connected together, engineers would create a new part number each time they needed something and were unaware that those things already existed.

So you get this AVL proliferation that gets out of control sometimes and the supply chain wants to optimize that. Being able to see all that together and actually have the engineers involved in the process if you want to make an AVL change, is greatly enhanced with this connector.

Heatherly Bucher

Yeah. And I would think in addition to optimization for supply chain purchasing decisions, it also improves resilience, right? In the supply chain, right?

If you have a clear understanding for each part, the volumes you need as you’re planning ahead for your production run Zoom. Today of course, I would say in recent years we’ve seen unprecedented disruptions of the supply chain beyond the controls of individual companies, right? And I think that this optimization is certainly part of it, but resilience in the supply chain, certainly being able to cut down on part proliferation scenario would be one of many ways you could build a more resilient supply chain.

Chuck McGinley

Yeah, Roger will probably mention a little bit about design reuse coming up, and I would just link into that part reuse. You don’t want to create six different part numbers for the same part because people are doing six times the work to get the build materials organized when that happens.
Having this system integrated and somebody’s already created this part for another product in the company—let’s reuse that. Let’s not reinvent the wheel.

Roger Chin

Yeah, that’s exactly right. And you see that data right off the bat. You want your engineers when they look up a part from your team database that they can see, hey, this part has been used in these BOMs.

This part has been approved, this part has been signed off by… If you guys have a librarian, if you have a component engineer, if it’s RoHS compliant, all of those different things now factor into the decision-making of whether you put this part on your board or not, right? It’s not just does it fit our design specs? You have so much… So many more other factors that you have to adjust for nowadays.

Chuck McGinley

Yeah, I would also mention you can leverage work other people have done. Let’s take a scenario where a part is already been approved, it’s RoHS compliant and all that good stuff, but it’s also been safety critical, right? So that the folks within the company have done all the legwork on that, right? And it’s great to know that because then that, hey, this is an okay part to use based on safety rules or anything else that the product might require in its requirements.

Roger Chin

Yeah. I’ll make a quick plug on our OrCAD side. More and more we’re seeing customers do not just part reuse or reusing parts of a circuit. You can take a whole power supply, verify it, and now have it be captured on the schematic and on the board side and plug that right into your circuit. So that’s a huge time saver that we’ve been seeing.

And having this integration really helps with that. You can trust the parts, you can trust the connectivity and the routing that you’ve done on a previous design and reuse it right away.

Heatherly Bucher

That’s powerful. Powerful features. My slides got a little ahead, but now that we’ve talked about the value to the business of putting a connection in place between EDA and PLM, let’s talk a little bit about what’s important to have in a great integration.

So we’ve all been in the business long enough that connecting systems today looks quite a bit different than the methods used at the start of all of our careers where it was very heavy lifts, often, right? Lots of coding, really kind of custom at each customer site. And of course, back in the day, we were also dealing with all on-prem platforms as well.

But some of the requirements for great integration are timeless. And so we have a bit of a list here that we put together when you’re looking at connections, I would say for any systems, this is not specific to EDA and PLM or to Cadence and Arena. I would tell our audience that this is the list you should use, looking for a great integration or connection regardless of the systems.

But let’s kind of walk through them a little bit and kind of focus on a few of them. From my perspective, the things that I like to call out, actually, I jump all the way down to the bottom of the list, which is the overall confidence in the connection. And that to me reflects robustness and scalability of an integration that I know as an owner of the system that it is going to be functioning correctly, right, every time it runs and I don’t need to babysit it, so to speak or check in on it all the time.

And I trust also that it’s built in a way that if it does encounter errors, because maybe configurations have changed in systems and we haven’t followed good change management practices between systems with our integrations, but it fails in a safe way that gives me errors, right? So to me, confidence overall is critical. Chuck, what for you stands out in this list?

Chuck McGinley

To me it’s feature-rich and zero-touch automation. We want to make sure that the engineers do participate in the process from the supply chain standpoint and having them do this right up front and get everything right at the beginning saves all the cleanup time on the back end.

And that is really the key to getting the product to the manufacturers to build for you and making sure that it’s correct.

Heatherly Bucher

Absolutely.

Roger Chin

Yeah, I’ll build right off of that. We have customers who when we start off discussing this whole flow, they often say, “Oh, we’ll try it without the integration. We have Arena, we have and CIS and CIP, but we’ll give our engineers a shot at doing this.”

And I would say almost every customer we’ve had in that flow eventually comes back to us telling us, “Hey, our engineers are just not putting their BOMs into Arena when we tell them to, as often as we need.” It’s not necessarily an issue of either tool’s, just these are things that take up time. They’re not necessarily something you do every day. So they kind of fall off onto the side. And that’s where this integration can be so helpful that you have buy-in from both the engineering side, the Arena side, and you make the flow exactly the way you want it.

You tell them these are the parts, these are the part fields that I like to hand off. These are the BOMs, these are the BOM categories. You set up that whole flow beforehand. And then the engineer, they just come in and they click one button, they say, this is the BOM. They open the design OrCAD and they hand it off right into Arena. And making that easy is really the biggest part that you don’t want it to take a lot of time.

You don’t want them to associate any kind of headache with this flow. From our experience of lots of engineering customers, that’s the best way to get them to do the work of putting in that data.

Heatherly Bucher

Absolutely. User adoption is critical. And then what about, I think this clear delineation of data ownership.

Chuck, what’s been your experience in working with many customers over the years with connecting these systems and taking them through that thought process of data ownership?

Chuck McGinley

Yeah. So again, it gets to the communication process through the whole stream of the product development, right? It gets to… Getting the bill of materials in correctly, getting it to the CM so that the CM can even pre-approve sometimes changes, right? If you design in a part that is long lead time or something that they’re going to have difficulty getting, you’re going to want to know both that early on.

So the ownership of that is both supply chain and engineering, and we want them to communicate that as smoothly and quickly as possible. The turnaround time on that is key to know that.

Heatherly Bucher

Absolutely. All right. Now let’s talk library management because when we were prepping for this session, we got into some, or I would say the two of you got into some interesting discussion about library management, that there’s often confusion and best practices, the process overall, the ownership.
And this slide is for Roger because when we were preparing and we started talking about library management, Roger, you shared about how important it is to “free the engineer.” So can you lead us off in talking a little bit about library management?

Roger Chin

Yeah. And just from our experience, even only focusing on the ECAD side where engineers are creating parts, the biggest thing they come to us telling us, “Hey, how can we just make it easier?” These engineers, they don’t want to be building symbols from scratch.

They don’t want to be building footprints from scratch. They don’t want to be copying, pasting fields from data sheets to a symbol. So we’ve really empowered engineers on the CIP side to help with all that. But now you have even more data, right? You have approval fields, you have AVLs as Chuck has been discussing, you have corporate part numbers, right?

Engineers, they don’t want to be tracking all that and managing all that. So a class example, you find the part you want, you put it into your schematic, how are you going to put that BOM into Arena? It doesn’t have a corporate part number right now. You might be historical, you might be emailing somebody, waiting for a reply. That person might be super busy like you see here in the meme, they might be short of staff.

Now you’re sitting back waiting, right? Or you might have to go and dig it up and try to do it yourself. So what we’ve accomplished really is really nice in that you can do all of that and have it be automated.

It’ll automatically generate that part number. It’ll automatically tie in the exact fields that you need to hand over to Arena. And the engineer can focus on what they know best and not have to track all this stuff in their head.

Heatherly Bucher

Free the engineer. Chuck, does that resonate with you?

Chuck McGinley

Sure does.

Heatherly Bucher

When you were an engineer, you would’ve liked to have been freed from some of that, I’m sure.

Chuck McGinley

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, back in the day, the CIS product was not available back then, although OrCAD was. So the data itself was a file that you would export, then you’d have to hand massage it and hand it to doc control to have them actually build it.

And again, that’s the process you want to get away from.

Heatherly Bucher

Absolutely. Okay, Roger, I know you’re prepared to show us how the Cadence Arena integration works. So let’s jump into a live demo to illustrate the best-practice process that we’ve been talking about.

Roger Chin

Awesome, thank you, Heatherly. I will share my screen and let me know when you can see it.

Heatherly Bucher

Yes.

Roger Chin

All right. Yeah, welcome everybody to OrCAD and I am using OrCAD X, so that has CIS included in it. And in our flow today we’ll have this design be tied into CIP. So that’s our engineering database in the background. So again, you have your engineering-side database.

This can be tied right into your Arena database. So all the part numbers you want from Arena will automatically synchronize into this CIP OrCAD database. So when your users place parts, when they link any symbols in the designs against the database, you’re seeing the same corporate part numbers that are in your Arena database. So the placement side is great, but let’s show you the new part introduction because that’s what I’ve been discussing a lot, right? Engineers might go out. So here is CIP, our OrCAD database.

You can come in and you can pull parts right off DigiKey or these other vendors right here. And I’ll use a part… Real quick, so I can look up the manufacturer part number, find the exact part I want, see the inventory, the data sheet, some of that information here. And as part of our integration, we’ve done the work of having a pre-built symbols, footprints, 3D step models. So again, things that you can… Especially for younger engineers, they don’t enjoy doing. So we can give you a head start on all of that data for you to pull right into your database.

Now when you build up a part here and you create a temporary part inside of CIP and you go and download the symbols, this still only exists in your OrCAD side, right? We’re still isolated from… This has no corporate part number. Arena is not aware of this part yet. So we won’t be able to take this part and push it into a BOM that can go right into Arena.

So let’s show that flow. So I’ve already taken this part, I’ve created a temp part out of it. I’ve mapped the symbol, gotten some information pulled down from DigiKey, and this is still a temporary part, right? So if I’m ready, I can take this part and try to convert it to an Arena part number. So this is a temporary part. When I go through this flow, it will go and reach out to Arena and get the next available part number.

And immediately I want to show you that our integration has some checks put in. It’ll warn you, “Hey, it’s great you picked that apart, but you’re not ready. You haven’t mapped in what’s the part type of this field.” So we can come in and CIP actually has some auto generation you can do and it can read other fields and map it in exactly based on the criteria from other fields.

So I’ll do that. I’ll give it a part type, make the change I need. And then now I’m ready to convert this to an Arena number. So I’m logging into Arena right from OrCAD right here. So when I log in… I probably need to change my password. It’s important to update your passwords of course. And you can see here, my categories are automatically mapped, right? CIP has part categories, Arena has part categories. And when we build this implementation, we build it so that there’s a mapping between the two so that your engineer automatically will be able to auto-generate to a part number following the schema in your Arena side.

And then you can see here, you can dictate all the fields you want mapped in your OrCAD side that you want to hand over into your Arena side. You can start doing things like here, DigiKey, they name this part with a manufacturer like this, manufacturer name like this. In Arena, we expect it to have analog devices, that’s just a name. So it’ll clean that up as a process. You can tell it whether this is an indirect or direct source.

You can even choose to hand up the data sheet from CIP right into Arena as you pass over this data. So the engineer, they really don’t have to make too many decisions here. They can verify, okay, this is the part I picked out. This is the data I’m handing up. I can simply hit convert to Arena, it’ll clean up the name for me, and then I will now have an actual part number assigned to this part inside of my tool.

So I don’t have to leave OrCAD, I don’t have to look up the part numbers, I don’t have to know the part number scheme. Now this part exists both in CIP and in Arena. And in my design, I can place it right down on my schematic and immediately get to work and stay inside OrCAD, right? I didn’t have to delay waiting for someone to generate the part number.

I didn’t have to go and step outside the tool. Everything is done as part of that handoff. Now let’s say you build up the design, you get it the way you want, exactly. You can come right into OrCAD and actually hand off this whole design as a BOM into Arena without first generating a spreadsheet like you would have to historically, massaging it.

You don’t have to do any intermediate steps. All that is done through our integration. I can hit this import BOM and immediately I can take this BOM and I can either import it to an existing BOM number and update the working rev. In my case, I’ll create a new number. I can pick the category that goes into it. This is a PCA. It’ll automatically generate a BOM number.

And for those of you familiar with CIS, you can manage your variants as well. You can have as many variants as you want, and you can pick those variants as the BOM import from CIP. And here are some of those checks that we’ve built into the tool. You can see right off the bat, do I have any parts that have restricted values? None of my parts… In my case, I flagged them if they’re tagged as obsolete, those parts will not be able to import it in my BOMs.

So I can have the confidence that my design fits the rules I have built into place. And likewise, do I have any parts in my schematic that don’t have an Arena part number yet? And they can go and check through every symbol on there, verify it, make sure you’re good to go. And now you can hit import and bring this data from OrCAD right into Arena.

So we’ll let it do its work, and then I will open this up in Arena once that part number is generated for us.
I can proceed as, doing some checking. So we’ve successfully imported the BOM in. I can copy this number and I’ll bring up my Arena web page, hop it over here.
And now just to show you that BOM exists in Arena. We can see when it comes up, when it was created just now, today at this time.
And then you can see all of those reference designators, all of those parts, the part numbers, the descriptions, all of that information is handed off right into Arena, into the working revision so that you can now not have to worry about doing any hand massaging, right?
You can see all the reference designators, all the data that you need from CIP into Arena. And while I’m here, I will go and click on this new part I just created today just to show you.

Here’s that new part number I pull from DigiKey, and you can see the sourcing relationship from analog devices. That new part number automatically noted that I built it in OrCAD, handed it off into Arena. So changes from this side to the part, again will propagate right back into CIP. So you have a full loop, you can now…

I’ll use your phrase, Heatherly, free the engineer to continue working on the design. And then any changes to the AVL, to maybe certain fields, will propagate back onto the schematic so that you can trust the data that you have on both sides. And I’ll finish off by showing inside OrCAD. We also have built in the ability to take any part on our schematic and see what other BOMs is used.

And I can right click on it and see the Arena where used, and immediately it’ll search up that part number and tell me, “Hey, these are all the other BOMs, these are all the other revs.” It’s using this reference designator on that design, how many on each one? And I can now… If I want to, I can open up those designs and use it as a starting point to see how that component might have been implemented, right? Encouraging you to reuse parts, take advantage of existing designs. So a lot of data now that your engineer can see right inside OrCAD.

Thanks for your time, everybody.

Heatherly Bucher

Thank you, Roger, for showing us how the connection works. Every time I see it, I love it. It’s efficient, accurate automation, enforces the business rules, and designed to provide transparency throughout the design process.

So we do have disciplines of reuse, for example, and avoiding part proliferation. Question for you, how flexible is the connection itself as far as customization options with individual customers and maybe their configurations of both OrCAD and Arena?

Roger Chin

Yeah, that’s a great point. Sorry I stopped sharing. I didn’t know if you want to share Heatherly, but…

Heatherly Bucher

Yeah, I’ll share in a minute, but go ahead and keep talking.

Roger Chin

Okay, awesome. Yeah, so the great thing about this implementation, as you mentioned, we’ve built a really strong tool, but what we’ve really found success doing is actually pulling in the stakeholders, right? We usually bring in the engineers, we bring in the guys at each company that actually works inside the Arena side, and then we talk to them and say, “Hey, what fields do you care about being shared between the two sides? What fields are controlled by Arena and must be in Arena to then go back into OrCAD? What fields do you want to leave only in OrCAD?”

These types of adjustments, I’ll say are exactly why we do this as a service project for each customer that goes down this integration. We take the tool, we make sure that the way it’s rolled out to the production environment for the whole team is actually how they’re designing and using it on the day-to-day.

So we put in that groundwork beforehand, and it might take a couple of weeks, but that’s the work we put into that. You don’t have to worry about things not being what you expect later, the wrong data being handed off.

So yeah, all important aspects of actually implementing this integration.

Heatherly Bucher

Fabulous. All right. To highlight the benefits and value customers achieve when connecting Cadence and Arena, part of this digital product thread, we do have a case study of ChargePoint to share. ChargePoint uses Cadence OrCAD with the EMA bidirectional connection to their Arena platform. And as we can see, their challenges echo much of what we’ve discussed with disconnected data, errors, and manual inefficient processes.

And the impact that they have documented as a result of the connection is, I think, fabulous and stunning. One hundred percent accuracy in the parts and BOM transfer, which as Roger just demonstrated, right?

When you have it properly mapped and it’s supporting your business processes, you take the human data error element out of the equation. And also for them, the streamlined faster processes, right? Real-time access to the Arena PLM information inside OrCAD as we’ve been talking about and Roger demonstrated.

Giving engineers the ability to stay within their design tool but still pull critical information from Arena. And then the result is reduction in time taken to get to PLM-ready BOMs. So, Roger and Chuck, does this experience that ChargePoint has had and the value they’ve seen, does it echo what you’ve seen with other companies when they connect systems?

Chuck McGinley

Definitely.

Roger Chin

Yeah. I can speak a little, too, to our side that that phrase is just amazing. It’s exactly both the primary motivator and the main thing we’re trying to solve with this integration. And it works. It’s just amazing how when we go back to customers and ask them, “Hey, how can we improve the tools? How can we make this integration better?” This exactly is what we hear back. It’s amazing that they can now see… They can see the exact data. The more BOMs are showing up, more frequently are data parts being updated from OrCAD into Arena. And they can see that other engineers are buying into the process.

Chuck McGinley

Yeah. That first bullet, zero-touch BOM and part transfer, that is the one that brings the engineers in by the droves into the process when they get that.

Heatherly Bucher

Get their enthusiastic participation, right, Chuck?

Chuck McGinley

Exactly.

Heatherly Bucher

All right. So before we wrap up, I wanted to ask you both, based on your experience, what else should companies be doing today to improve electrical design and product management practices?

If you had one nugget or piece of wisdom to tell them that we haven’t talked about, what should they be doing?

Roger Chin

Yeah, I can start off a little bit there. So we’ve been talking a lot about data and managing data, handing off data, and a big aspect of what we’re seeing more and more is you want the data to be there fast too.

You want the engineer to have that right off the bat as they’re placing parts. And that’s what we’ve been really pushing with this CIS CIP flow. When you place and search parts, you want your engineers to be searching and seeing the data that comes from all these data sources, right? Arena part number, end-of-life predictions, and both CIP and the Arena site. We also have a integration with SiliconExpert, right? We see the importance of tackling end of life, tackling inventory. And more and more customers come to us saying, “We need this.” We can’t just send off a BOM to SiliconExpert when we’re ready and get it back.

We need our engineers to be placing parts that we know are good before we even get to the BOM step, right? We need to be… Not deal with routing, connecting, and using all these parts only to realize five weeks down the line that this part can’t even be purchased right now. These are things that you have to get as soon as possible.

Chuck McGinley

Yeah. And by connecting your system to sources like SiliconExpert, you get predictive types of things. In other words, this particular part is high risk and then you’re not reactive to when it does go end of life, right? You can preliminarily look at things and remove them from your AVL if they’re high risk. That’s a very manual, labor-intensive process without an integration.

Heatherly Bucher

Yeah, I think going back to even what we saw in that Tech-Clarity survey, making better business decisions, right? Which means more visibility.

We talk about everything is data now around the physical product you’re producing, but it’s all digital data around the production of that physical product and how critical it is to get as much of that data as you both are talking about, as much of that data as possible in front of engineers that they need when they’re making decisions, right?

Because of course, better decisions earlier, right? In the new product development process means we’re more likely to hit the new product development introduction timeline and stay within the cost structures that have been established. I think all of engineering you’ve seen… I don’t have a slide for it, but everyone has seen the curve of the later you make the decisions and the MPD process, the more expensive it is, right?

And the more likely it is to delay. So I think that’s a great piece of wisdom and takeaway. Thank you for sharing all of your wisdom with us today, Chuck and Roger.

And to our audience, thank you for joining our session on Automating EDA and PLM data flows. If you would like more information on the connection we just discussed today, you can check out the arenasolutions.com marketplace listing for it, and there’s a wealth of information there. Or you can reach out directly to Arena or EMA for more information.

And of course, if you are searching for a new EDA solution and/or a PLM platform, we hope you take a look at Cadence and Arena, of course. Thank you again for joining us.