Electronic Library & Data Management

There are never any questions about who “owns” the design data. The chance of multiple copies of the data worked on by different people is eliminated. Any users outside of the check-out user or team will at most have “read-only” access to the data.

The ability to assign who has access to a given design project or data set is extremely powerful. The entire engineering team does not need access to all of your design IP. Good data management gives you the ability to assign access all the way down to view capability on every bit of data.

Maintaining a centralized vault location for corporate design IP with today’s distributed “at home” workforce is a critical concern. People need controlled access to the data and the company needs to protect and secure its IP.

Supporting multiple locations becomes a reality with all engineering data controlled in one environment. Access rights and data controls supply all the tools necessary to support a truly global environment.

There are times in every design cycle where an engineer has wished that they had access to a copy of the data from last week. No worries, you have the ability to “back-track” to any check-in version of the design.

There are times during the lifecycle of a design where you may need to bring an older release version of a design-forward. Version “leap-frogging” gives you a simple method to bring version C of the design-forward even when the current version is at H.

The ability to store and re-use blocks of “known-good” circuits has long been the desire of many companies. The ability to store and manage libraries of these blocks is finally here. Re-use is accomplished with a simple “drag-drop” operation.

Ever had issues with component availability? How many designs are affected by this? Assessing the impact of a problem like this problem is simple when the design data and component library are managed in the same tool. Where-used tracing is even available for re-used circuit blocks. In fact, any data item you re-use is traced back to its origin.

Making sure that an output package is complete is an error-prone operation. Does the PLM/PDM package have all the required outputs? Document generation automatically produces the chosen list of outputs and vaults them in the desired location along with your design data.

No more worries over dealing with multiple copies of your ECAD library. All of your librarians can work on a single centralized library. Approvals and peer reviews are fully supported. The use of pre-release parts is fully tracked and traced. The library itself can be easily synchronized to multiple locations.

The ability to manage native design data has many benefits. One of the biggest is intelligent EBOM. The EBOM is directly linked with the schematic, board, ECAD library, and component library. The EBOM becomes the collection point for design information. It is not just a file.