Designing High Speed Printed Circuit Boards Using DxDesigner and Expedition

Mentor's DxDesigner and Expedition schematic capture and printed circuit board tools were chosen to implement a custom high speed signal processing board containing many high pin count Field Programmable Gate Arrays and many high speed serial connections with data rates over 2 Gigasamples/sec. The methodology used to place the parts and route the board involved the interaction of both the DxDesigner and Expedition tools. The basic design philosophy was to specify as much as possible through design constraints at the schematic level. This paper will explore implementing that philosophy in both tools to facilitate part placement and trace routing.