This is Zach, the PCB Designer.
The simulation engineer, Maxim, has just completed a thermal analysis and his recommended placement
adjustments have been made by the Mechanical Engineer, Alex.
I will now begin a Design for Assembly (DFA) analysis on the fully placed and optimized
board using Valor NPI.
Design for Assembly ensures that part placement will work for production.
Analysis can be done multiple times throughout the design’s life and should be done as
part of placement approval before the routing stage.
This analysis can help avoid wasted time later on in the design lifecycle.
The use case of the design or product in the field also needs to be considered.
The time and resource cost of repair or failure due to an incorrect component, placement issue,
or faulty solder joint can be a huge setback.
Valor NPI provides the tools to fully prepare the design for production and ensure the highest
product quality.
I am looking to analyze the board and verify the design integrity and reliability through
each component, using the Valor Part Library, as well as each solder joint in the design.
With the Valor NPI plugin, I can run a DFA analysis with Valor technology from directly
within Xpedition Layout.
Any issues found can be addressed from within the Hazard Explorer, this means that I do
not have to spend time learning a new GUI outside of Xpedition Layout.
I will load Xpedition DFM and now select my classification set of IPC rules and perform
an analysis for component placement only.
I'll now select perform analysis, and once the analysis is complete, the results can
be viewed here on the left in the Xpedition DFM tab in the Hazard Explorer.
Opening up the Hazard Explorer, we'll go look at a few of these issues.
I will focus on the placement of the termination resistors for the DDR4 interface.
Looking at the component spacing, chip S to chip S package type, we can see that Xpedition
DFM is showing that the components are placed too close together.
If I select one of these errors, we can view it in the layout window here.
We can see these DDR4 termination resistors are too close together.
To fix this error I will spread out the resistor components and run another analysis to verify
that the issue is fixed.
Using the spread parts command in Xpedition, I can spread out all the termination resistor
components at once.
Now that the parts are spread out, I will run the DFA analysis once again.
After the analysis is complete, we'll navigate back to the Xpedition DFM tab of the hazard
explorer and verify that the issues were resolved.
Back in the hazard explorer, we'll navigate to our chip S to chip S component types, and
we can see that there's minus eight errors, so the placement issues regarding these termination
resistors have been resolved by spreading them out.
Running this DFA analysis enabled us to locate and correct potential component placement
issues that could cost time and resources later in the design lifecycle.
Now that the placement hazards found by Xpedition DFM are fixed, Wilfried can move on to defining
plane shapes on the board.