ELESIGHT’s design and library translation service is theperfect place to start when looking to change PCB design tools. Although most CAD tools have built infeatures for design import, such translations are imperfect and often riddledwith bugs and issues. Our expert team isvery experienced with design translations and the manual steps that need to bedone post-import to ensure the full design’s integrity.
For small designs, although automated translation can savetime initially, trying to resolve all the bugs, misinterpretations, and featuredissimilarities usually makes the process about as long as a manual translation. We usually recommend doing a manualtranslation for designs with <100 unique parts. Such a translation will require initiallibrary translation, schematic redrawing, and finally layout redesign. By using built in functions to extract routeand shape placement, component placement, and constraint reports, we can redesignan almost perfect copy of the original design. For those customers who are OK with a little additional redesign, we canalso preserve the netlist and component placement, while doing all routing fromscratch.
For medium and large designs, we suggest using automated translationwith a very thorough design review to ensure that no information is lost. ELESIGHT works closely with all customerdesigns to identify critical routing areas, shape geometries, and keyconstraints so that we can ensure their translation comes through. In cases where they don’t we leverage ourtool expertise to recreate the derived layout to resemble the original as closelyas possible. Throughout the process, wealways do netlist compares and can run additional simulations to make surethere are no hot spots, impedance discontinuities, or other areas of concern.
For companies planning a complete migration from one PCB designtool to a new one, one of the biggest downsides is losing years of work on alibrary. ELESIGHT offers librarytranslation to help ease that transition, as well as addon services to ensurethat the new library is fully compatible for modern PCB design features, suchas 3D model support or use of special layers for assembly data. We employ a series of checks and even offerfabrication validation to ensure that every footprint matches the original.
Check out our about page to see which EDA tools we supportand let us know if you’re looking to translate a design or library. Our experts use every tool available and amanual checking procedure to ensure that your design data matches the originalas closely as possible. Contact us nowto find out more!
