Cadence’s Allegro X uses AI to accelerate circuit board design by 10X

Cadence Design Systems announced the Cadence Allegro X AI technology to accelerate the design of printed circuit boards as much as 10 times.

PCBs such as system motherboards are ubiquitous parts of electronics, and they always have to be designed to do a specific job at the lowest cost possible.

So Cadence is tapping AI with the Allegro X Design Platform to deliver transformative time savings for PCB design, with placement and routing (P&R) tasks, where the time for tasks is reduced from days to minutes. And the boards come out with equivalent or higher quality compared with manually designed boards from human engineers.

Of course, AI is nothing new at Cadence, as the company talked about “automating” chip design back in 1988 when the company was born. At that time, chips were getting so complex that engineers needed help from software that could ease the burden through automation. Now, the AI takes advantage of the latest gains in generative AI technology and it is used in conjunction with traditional computational algorithms used for layout design.

Place-and-route in PCB design is traditionally a manual time-intensive process that impacts time-to-market. Engineers have to create the optimal path for electronic signals to pass through a circuit board.

The Allegro X AI technology leverages the scalability of the cloud for physical design automation, offering generative design of the PCB while ensuring the design is electrically correct and manufacturable. The new technology automates placement, metal pouring, and critical net routing, and is integrated with fast signal integrity and power integrity analysis. Using the generative AI capabilities, customers can streamline their system design process achieving a 10 times or more reduction in PCB design turnaround time, the company said.

“Cadence is committed to delivering system design solutions that incorporate the power of AI and cloud technology to ensure the fastest turnaround times,” said Michael Jackson, corporate vice president of R&D at Cadence, in a statement. “The new Allegro X AI technology extends Cadence’s technology leadership in PCB design and provides a transformative impact, offering customers greater productivity through AI-powered automation, improved engine performance and integration with Cadence’s system design and analysis product portfolio.”

Tech benefits

The Allegro X AI technology enables improved productivity. It results in a dramatic reduction in design turnaround time by automating placement, leveraging a scalable architecture that uses compute infrastructure on the cloud.

It also offers better quality results: Placement automation using generative AI enables feasibility analysis in the early phases of design. Exploring a much larger solution space than what is possible through manual methods, the technology drives optimization of metrics such as shorter wire lengths while adhering to the design constraints.

And it creates efficient design closure as it is integrated tightly with system analysis technologies through the Allegro X Platform where the user can optimize the designs for electrical and thermal performance.

“The Allegro X AI technology reduces the placement time from days to minutes, while taking
into account signal integrity and power integrity effects,” said Allan Nørgaard, CID, PCB design at Velux in a statement. “The AI technology was also able to provide me with placement options that I had not considered. The technology dramatically decreases design time and will fundamentally change how we do PCB designs.”

Asked if the AI eliminates human engineers’ jobs, Cadence said it does not and it serves as a creative partner to enhance an engineer’s productivity.