OREANDA-NEWS. Mentor Graphics Corporation today announced that Siemens Building Technologies has deployed Mentor’s SystemVision® product with  Siemens printed circuit board (PCB) design teams around the world, providing an upfront, mechatronic simulation environment and a qualified, central library for the Mentor Graphics® Xpedition® Enterprise PCB design flow. Early simulation using the SystemVision tool allows designers to make design decisions regarding component tradeoffs, find design mistakes, and verify their designs before PCB layout. The central library allows teams to exchange projects around the world which eliminates errors due to using different libraries and tools for simulation and PCB layout.

The SystemVision multi-discipline collaboration environment lets designers at Siemens Building Technologies explore concepts, validate performance specifications, and investigate architectures of systems developed for modern, energy-efficient building systems. These systems are comprised of electrical (analog, digital, and mixed-signal), mechanical, embedded software, and controls. Teams from Switzerland, France, China, and the United States save valuable design time by validating electrical circuits within the context of the mechanical systems with which they interface, before committing to the PCB layout. Using a central library that contains all the information required for design capture, simulation, and PCB design provides a seamless design flow.

At their headquarters in Zug, Switzerland, the Siemens team worked closely with the Mentor Graphics team to configure and test the new solution, and then train the worldwide designers to use it. Designers now draw one schematic in Mentor’s DxDesigner® environment for PCB design and use that same schematic in SystemVision for simulation and in the Xpedition flow for layout. The central library allows worldwide teams to share SPICE, VHDL-AMS, digital, and PCB models, rapidly deploy updated or new models, and easily reproduce simulation results from colleagues.