We want to partition a bigger product into smaller modules to make the task of designing those modules and testing those modules as individual clusters of functions that sort of make sense together. One reason engineering firms do multi-board designs is to divide and conquer. This all ended up being multi-board systems design. We also had the team in Shanghai for a while doing IoT modular design. So we had some pretty high-end designers, people like Dave Jones, who runs the EEV blog now, and some of his colleagues back in Australia.

We even had our own internal hardware team for some time, doing the FPGA development boards. It's not a complicated concept, and many of Altium's engineers and product managers have come from a background of designing new electronics. For the June 2018 issue of Design007 Magazine, Editors Andy Shaughnessy and Stephen Las Marias spoke with Ben Jordan, director of product and persona marketing for Altium, about the company’s multi-board design tools, the challenges that customers face, and the numerous trade-offs that designers must contend with while performing multi-board design.Īndy Shaughnessy: Ben, why don’t you begin by telling us about multi-board design and multi-board EDA tools.īen Jordan: Multi-board design is, from my and Altium's point of view, simply the challenge of designing systems where there is more than one printed circuit board. But multi-board designs have become almost ubiquitous over the past decade, and EDA software companies are working to improve and simplify the multi-board design process. Not too long ago, historically speaking, most electronic products contained only one PCB.

Altium cable harness