About Meteca

Founded in 2018, Meteca is an electronics development company headquartered in Ticino, Switzerland, with an R&D office in Turin, Italy. The company specializes in the design, production, and global distribution of circuit boards and System-on-Modules (SOMs) for the fast-growing IoT market. Meteca’s products aim to simplify the transition from product development to full-scale production for electronics OEMs worldwide.

Goals

Meteca set out to validate a new concept designed to significantly improve the difficulties that electronics OEMs face when moving from product development to production. This bridge product, simplifying the path from electronics development to production, would be the first design for their Briki-branded product line. Meteca needed to prove functionality and proof of concept while reaching market launch quickly. Additionally, they needed to keep development costs under tight control in a highly competitive IoT landscape while meeting regulatory requirements for worldwide distribution.

Challenges

The complexity of Meteca’s PCBA bridge product introduced significant design challenges, including:

Complexity

The six-layer board required dense routing, tight trace widths, impedance control, and precise timing management across multiple microcontrollers handling both wireless and wired communication.

Signal Integrity

With a densely populated board and sensitive signals, ensuring signal integrity and proper operation is crucial for Meteca. This puts additional emphasis on differential pair routing, impedance control, propagation delay and signal coupling to achieve the best signal integrity.  

Development Time

Although designed to make life simpler and faster for companies that develop IoT electronic systems, Meteca’s products are complex. This results in long development cycles for prototype proof of concept and verification testing.

To address these challenges, Meteca needed a complete PCB design solution that would streamline the development process from concept and verification to manufacturing; they turned to OrCAD X.

Results

By adopting the OrCAD X PCB design platform, Meteca dramatically accelerated development while maintaining design quality and compliance. The company achieved:

• A 35% reduction in overall design time
• Pre-production 90 days ahead of schedule.
• Reduced development time by an additional 20% in future designs

Leveraging OrCAD X for product development positioned Meteca to complete designs quickly without sacrificing quality.

OrCAD X Capture

To effectively manage the different board sections required in their designs, Meteca leveraged hierarchical design capabilities and net classes included in OrCAD X Capture. Coupled with ease of use, Meteca was able to manage complex requirements and clearly communicate design intent while accelerating product development.

PSpice

Incorporating PSpice, Meteca was able to accelerate prototyping and the overall PCB development process. It provided a means of analyzing signals, avoiding unwanted behavior, and optimizing signal integrity before development.

OrCAD X PCB Designer

To manage the complex board stackup and constraints required for their designs, Meteca leveraged OrCAD X PCB Designer. With the powerful, hierarchical constraint manager they were able to define, manage, and verify rules for differential pairs, trace width, trace spacing, impedance control, propagation delay and more.

Based on these findings, Meteca plans to adopt additional signal integrity analysis through Sigrity X to expedite PCB development further and improve product quality. Learn more about how Meteca leveraged OrCAD X to accelerate their PCB development process, from prototype to production, here.