"As an award winning service bureau, our customers are continuing to require shorter design cycle times," stated Nick Barbin, president of Optimum Design Associates. "Now with XtremeAR, we can reduce our layout times on large boards by days and even weeks. This puts us at a competitive advantage and enables our customer to get to market faster."
Xtreme Design Technology
Over the past years, Mentor has continued to focus on its technology leadership initiative, which has resulted in several highly innovative developments. The company's patented Xtreme design technology provides the core for the industry's only capability to support multiple clients on a LAN or WAN network to simultaneously update a centrally located PCB design database. In November of 2004, Mentor announced the first application of the Xtreme design technology, XtremePCB(TM). This application enabled multiple CAD designers to simultaneously perform interactive place and route on a PCB with real time updates to a common database. XtremePCB was targeted at users performing manual routing and resulted in design cycle time reductions of 40-70 percent during the layout process.
XtremeAR is the next application of the patented Xtreme design technology and is targeted at users who are able to auto-route their large boards. XtremeAR uses the processors from up to 15 computers on a LAN or WAN network working simultaneously on the same PCB database. This cuts the routing times by up to ten times and can utilize second and third shift computer resources that would ordinarily be idle. Not only do these savings result in shorter design cycle times and higher designer productivity, but also can result in better design quality and system performance by giving designers time to run several trial component placements and routing scenarios and then pick the best results.
"Our unique and patented Xtreme design technology can now help companies who use auto-routing on large, mostly digital boards," said Henry Potts, vice president and general manager of Mentor's Systems Design Division. "We worked closely with several of our customers to develop this application and it is meeting their most optimistic cycle time and productivity expectations."
XtremeAR is available now and utilizes the same licenses as XtremePCB clients, giving users the flexibility to use the Xtreme design technology on either manual layout or auto-routing depending on their needs.
About Mentor Graphics
Mentor Graphics Corporation (Nasdaq: MENT) is a world leader in electronic hardware and software design solutions, providing products, consulting services and award-winning support for the world's most successful electronics and semiconductor companies. Established in 1981, the company reported revenues over the last 12 months of about $700 million and employs approximately 4,000 people worldwide. Corporate headquarters are located at 8005 S.W. Boeckman Road, Wilsonville, Oregon 97070-7777; Silicon Valley headquarters are located at 1001 Ridder Park Drive, San Jose, California 95131-2314. World Wide Web site: http://www.mentor.com/.
Mentor Graphics and Board Station are registered trademarks and Expedition, XtremePCB and XtremeAR are trademarks of Mentor Graphics Corporation. All other company or product names are the registered trademarks or trademarks of their respective owners.
Contact:
Mentor Graphics Debra Layton, 720-494-1043 Email Contact Suzanne Graham, 503-685-7789 Email Contact