Encore Engineering use Altium Designer to meet the challenges of contracting.
“Having a versatile product like Altium Designer helps us rapidly develop printed circuit solutions to satisfy the time and quality requirements of all our major international customers. For example, we easily saved a week on a project because of the flexibility of the Altium Designer PCB editor. From our point of view, Altium Designer provides the greatest number of features with the greatest return on our investment.”
Harry Selfridge
Encore Engineering Product and Services
The Need
Encore Engineering Services and Products is a contracting business that designs and develops a range of OEM circuits, specialising in Device Under Test (DUT) boards and interfaces for Automatic Test Equipment (ATE). With high profile clients such as Texas Instruments and Motorola, Encore must ensure customers remain competitive by providing a quick and reliable service. With a constant string of deadlines and a diverse customer base, Encore required a flexible toolset capable of turning over an assortment of PCB projects rapidly and with great precision.
The Challenge
It is common practice in contracting that a PCB project will become a “committee” project where chip designers, application engineers, and PCB signal integrity engineers are drawn together to provide input. This process can be complicated, with each input likely to result in a design modification. As a result Encore is regularly subjected to last minute work, relying on its toolset to manually layout and adjust tracks to accommodate such changes. For example, Encore was recently contracted to develop a dual-site high frequency test board. However, upon revision of this project the manufacturer requested the QFP chip to be internally flipped. This process reverses the physical location of the chip’s differential input and output pins; a time-consuming modification that could have prevented Encore from meeting its target.
The Solution
Altium Designer’s interactive routing capability meant Encore had complete freedom to add, change, delete, or move any part of the layout as desired. Its ability to import DWG format drawings and easily edit track layouts, plus the smart paste feature and tools to measure the length of selected objects, all provide the flexibility required for iterative ‘committee’ projects.
For Encore it would be impractical to try and match all its clients various software tools, but with Altium Designer, it can import supplier and customer information onto a single design platform. This helps unify the several data sets and reduces the production and productivity costs associated with using several disconnected toolsets.
The Results
Due to the flexibility and ease of use of the Altium PCB editor, Encore beat its deadline. By unifying the design processes Encore could easily go back and reuse most of its previous work, saving the company two weeks of redesign effort. Results could also be seen afterwards, with Encore being able to shave hours off the documentation process. Altium’s OutJob function automates Adobe Acrobat PDF documentation, which saves additional time by avoiding the usual process of generating, collating, and shipping paper documentation.
Customer Information
Encore Engineering Services and Products provide a range of PCB services to several high profile chip manufacturers such as Adaptec, Motorola and Texas Instruments. Its services include custom PCB designs and layouts, the development of electronic hardware tests and Device Under Test boards.
For more information, visit www.encoreengineering.com