Introducing Cadence OrCAD Release 16.5

Constraint Management

The amount of controlled and constrained nets per design is constantly increasing. To effectively manage these rules and achieve design closure these constraints must become an inherent part of your design data. Release 16.5 brings advanced technology to the mainstream, allowing you to define rules in the initial stages of your design process using a simple spreadsheet interface. These rules are then checked in real-time against your current PCB implementation to ensure they are followed throughout the design flow. This constraint-driven design flow accelerates the time to first-pass design success, while reducing the overall costs of end products.

With constraint manager you can define rules for: Individual nets, differential pairs, regions, specific layers, specific rules for nets on layers, and more.

Advanced PCB Editing

• Full Differential pair support allowing for automatic pair generation, interactive routing, and real time rule checking using Constraint Manager
• Multiple interactive delay tuning styles to help meet design rules including: Accordion, Trombone, and Sawtooth patterns
• Real time heads up display gives you instant feedback if you are meeting routing requirements
• Automated testpoint and fixture generation using Automatic Test Prep

Placement Upgrades

Placement application mode provides a tuned editing environment for placement operations. Added features include single pick to move components, dockable placement GUI, component alignment, and a pre-selection command designed to work on body centers. This mode also allows you to hover over symbols to perform basic functions, as well as a place by "Ref Des Name."

Replicate circuit based on common connectivity and devices. Blocks are represented as a group object in the database. Circuit files are stored in the database or on disk for re-use on other boards.

Full Signal Integrity Analysis

Signal integrity analysis is becoming a requirement to ensure compliance with many of the high speed standard interfaces in use today. Release 16.5 brings a powerful new signal integrity solution to the OrCAD market at a mainstream price. OrCAD PCB SI provides a fully integrated pre and post layout signal integrity analysis environment which directly ties into the new constraint manager capabilities to generate design constraints from your SI simulation results.

OrCAD PCB SI includes: full IBIS model support, Differential pair simulation, crosstalk analysis, PCB editor layout extraction, solution space analysis with simulation sweeps, constraint generation, and more.

Windows 7 Support

Release 16.5 is fully supported on Windows 7 32 and 64 bit systems, including support for Windows UAC (User Access Control) restrictions. Detailed system requirements are available here.