About G5 Engineering Solutions

Based in Tallahassee, Florida, G5 Engineering Solutions is a full-service engineering design firm delivering turnkey solutions across commercial, industrial, military, and medical industries. The company acts as either a complete engineering team or an extension of its customers’ teams, bringing complex electronic products from concept to production.

Goals

G5 Engineering set out to improve efficiency in routing and layout for its increasingly complex, high-density PCB designs while maintaining strict performance, reliability, and compliance requirements. With customers demanding rapid turnaround times and customizable products, the team needed a scalable PCB design environment that could support advanced constraints, high-speed interfaces, and frequent design changes without slowing development cycles.

Challenges

G5 Engineering Solutions offers core products which can be customized by its customers to create unique designs. The following are three examples of G5 Engineering’s work and some of the challenges associated with their complex designs.

gCore6x System On Module

The company’s core product is the 1.MX6-based gCore6x System On Module (SOM), which is the size of a business card. This design faced the following challenges:

Technological Customization

The versatile 1.MX6-based gCore6x SOM can be customized with support for 4GB DDR3 RAM, 2GB NAND Flash, and 64MB NOR Flash. Additionally, it can serve as a solo, dual lite, dual, and quad core processor.

Technological Complexity

The design must supply many high-speed interfaces including Gigabit Ethernet, SATA, HDMI, LVDS, 24-bit DSS, HS USB, MIPI DSI, Parallel CSI, and SDIO. Additional communication buses also include multiple UARTs, I2C and SPI.

Routing and Signal Integrity Challenges

The technological complexity coupled with the small profile of this design makes routing difficult. The SOM design becomes high-density board with 10 layers, 500-plus BGA balls that require fanout, through-silicon vias, LVDS differential pairs, and many critical nets. To manage such complexity, the team would need a user interface and advanced capabilities that would help avoid pitfalls when routing sensitive signals.

With the large amount of high-speed sensitive signals in this compact design, constraints were critical to avoid signal integrity issues. The team would need a design to setup constraints to avoid issues with crosstalk and ensure uniformity in trace width and spacing. This would save time and minimize routing iterations.

Handheld Military Device

G5 engineering needed to design a handheld military device which met both MIL-STD-810 and MIL-STD-461 and could support multiple adapters and attach equipment via a high-density pin array on the back of the unit.  This design faced the following challenges:

Technological Complexity

The device needed to include an application processor, accelerometer, digital compass, 5MP camera, touchscreen display, and support for NAND, NOR, DDR3, GPS, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

Rigid-Flex Design

The design involved a separate rigid-flex board for interfacing to a camera module. This board required a five layer rigid section and a three-layer flexible section. Rigid-flex designs require advanced PCB design capabilities to address additional complexities such as contour routing, region-based rules, bend definition and management, and inter-layer checking.

Routing and Signal Integrity Challenges

Both the technological complexity and the additional design concerns with a rigid-flex board result in routing and signal integrity challenges. The team had to account for Electromagnetic Interference (EMI), ensure proper routing constraints, incorporate shielding and grounding, and manage multiple design constraints.

Rugged Industrial Unit

G5 Engineering needed to design an industrial wireless data collection unit that communicates to and collects data from a vehicle’s on-board computer within a fleet vehicle fuel management system. This design faced the following challenges:

Technological Complexity

At the core of the rugged industrial unit was the gCore6x SOM design with an accelerometer, temperature sensor, mini PCI Express and USB interfaces included. In addition, it required cellular, RF radio, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth communication support and HDMI and LVDS interfaces for future expandability of the display. The docking unit needed to support external power for the system and be expanded to support additional communication buses to the main unit such as USB, Ethernet, and UART.

Cost-Reduction

During the design process, the customers needed to reduce costs during manufacturing. To accomplish this G5 engineering was required to switch the design from blind and buried vias to through hole vias.

Time-To-Market

The customer had an aggressive timeline. This meant that G5 Engineering had to save time, reduce iterations, and streamline the PCB layout and routing wherever possible.

Each of these designs not only had high technical complexity but faced aggressive time-to-market targets, this is when G5 Engineering relied on the capabilities of OrCAD X.

Results

By using OrCAD X PCB Designer Professional and supporting OrCAD tools such as OrCAD X Capture CIS and CIP, G5 Engineering minimized routing iterations and saved weeks of design time across multiple projects.

gCore6x System On Module

G5 Engineering saved about a week’s worth of time by using OrCAD X PCB Designer Professional, specifically the real-time design rule checking throughout the routing process. That is a significant time-savings for a project that required routing completion in just three weeks time.

“Once we set up our differential pairs, we could just go ahead and route. We could see right away if something was interfering. I don’t see how anyone could do this level of routing without those OrCAD tools.” Brian Ruck, Director of Electrical and Systems Engineering, G5 Engineering

Handheld Military Device

The rugged handheld computer included a rigid-flex design. Although they haven’t worked with OrCAD X PCB Professional for rigid-flex designs prior, the team was able to experience productivity success. G5 Engineering was able to meet a critical project timeline, delivering its product (adhering to military-grade specifications) from schematic to layout in just four months.

Rugged Industrial Unit

The first prototype of this design leveraged blind and buried vias to bring out the high-speed interfaces, but after review, the customer decided against having all of the data lines as the cost was too high. This required G5 Engineering to redesign the board. They found that OrCAD X PCB Professional greatly helped this process with the ability to quickly and globally modify vias.