Company: home2net | Industry: Industrial IoT | Solution: OrCAD X

About home2net

home2net is a German enterprise specializing in secure, easy-to-use smart cloud solutions for OEMs operating in the Internet of Things (IoT) and Industry 4.0 markets. The company designs and develops all hardware and software products in house and offers integrated cloud solutions in partnership with a high-availability European data center. home2net’s solutions enable applications such as remote control, monitoring, data logging, and device administration across industrial automation, cloud, and smart building environments.

Goals

home2net set out to help traditional product manufacturers quickly add IoT capabilities, such as remote monitoring and control, without requiring deep expertise in cloud computing, secure networking, or mobile applications. The goal is to optimize the use model of traditional products by incorporating a smartphone’s display to act as a worldwide remote control. To achieve this, the company needed a flexible platform that could support multiple OEM applications while meeting aggressive time-to-market expectations.

Challenges

home2net set out to design the web@ctrl platform. This introduced significant engineering complexity requiring support for a wide range of digital, analog, and high-power interfaces and at the same time, the solution had to comply with strict mechanical constraints.

Design Complexity

home2nets web@ctrl1 solution required a wide range of devices to support the required digital, analog and high-power interfaces. The design needed to route serial interfaces to Ethernet and connect peripherals to the cloud, connect peripheral devices via RS232/RS485 interfaces or digital inputs and read analog values and drive inductive loads with its digital outputs.

Design Space

The design solution needed to fit into a European standardized Rail Mount 1 TE housing for home control appliances. Nearly two-thirds of the available PCB space was consumed by connectors, ESD protection, and safety components that had to be placed close to power interfaces. The remaining space needed to accommodate high-voltage power nets, sensitive fine-pitch BGAs, and dense mixed-signal circuitry while still meeting spacing and safety rules.

Multiple Design Variants

The design needed to support multiple OEM applications- this equated to creating a base design that could be altered to fit the specific customer needs. This can be accomplished through product variants such as differing component values, do not stuff parts, and varying technology for specific design variations which can be difficult to manage.

Managing this level of complexity across multiple product variants, without slowing development, required advanced constraint management, hierarchical design capabilities, and reliable design rule checking.

Results

home2net turned to the OrCAD X PCB design solution. By designing the web@ctrl1 solution with OrCAD X, home2net achieved a 30% faster development cycle, realized 15% cost savings, and consistently met stringent time-to-market targets. The OrCAD X PCB Design solution offered time savings at every stage of the design process:

Schematic Design

home2net leveraged the hierarchical design capabilities of OrCAD X Capture CIS. This allowed them to create a block-based, modular design to manage and reuse known-good circuitry in multiple designs. Additionally, they leveraged the Component Information System (CIS) functionality to manage assembly variants in one PCB layout. With OrCAD X Capture CIS, they created one layout to serve multiple customers, manage design variants, communicate differences between PCB layouts, reduce time spent creating and managing designs, and decrease engineering costs.

PCB Design

During a primarily analog PCB development process, home2net leveraged the advanced features of OrCAD X PCB Designer Professional with the most used features being

• • Shielding
  • Supply planes
  • Dynamic healing when routing or moving components

Additionally, home2net relied on the hierarchical constraint manager to accurately assign, manage, and verify the required complex rules for the design. The constraint manager in OrCAD X was able to efficiently and accurately manage their complex requirements including:

• • Rules must be grouped into netclasses for different signals and shapes.
  • Different rules have to be applied to single nets depending on the location of the board.
  • Rules must be assigned by area to manage the huge number of specific rules and exceptions (for example, if you have multiple amps next to a sensitive μBGA)

Design rules in combination with the online design rule checking (DRC) provided home2net with immediate feedback of what was possible in such a dense and miniaturized design.

Manufacturing

home2net leveraged OrCAD Productivity Toolbox to standardize its manufacturing output flow. OrCAD Productivity Toolbox was used to streamline manufacturing documentation, with the ability to generate manufacturing documents quickly and accurately, an essential aspect to meeting time-to-market targets.

By adopting OrCAD X Capture CIS, OrCAD X PCB Designer Professional, and OrCAD Productivity Toolbox, home2net transformed its PCB development process. Hierarchical and modular design approaches enabled the reuse of proven circuitry, while region-based constraints and online DRCs provided immediate feedback during routing.  

This functionality and the direct effects seen through significant time savings and improvements to the PCB design flow allowed home2net to keep pace with rapid software innovation in the IoT market while delivering reliable, compact, and scalable hardware solutions to OEM customers.

Download the full customer story here to learn more about how home2net leveraged the OrCAD X PCB Design solution.