TLA winners: Best Design Overall
The 28th PCB Technology Leadership Award (TLA) winners have been selected!
The competition, which started in 1988, is the longest running of its kind in the EDA industry. Design teams who use Mentor/Siemens solutions submit their designs, and are awarded by an independent panel of industry-expert judges. This year we received entries from all over the world, representing a wide range of design types.
The industry judges have picked winners from several industry categories, and this year because so many great designs were submitted, a category was added for significant contenders. The categories include:
- Computers, blade and servers, memory systems
- Consumer electronics, handheld
- Industrial control, instrumentation, security, medical
- Military, aerospace
- Telecom, network controllers, line cards
- Transportation, automotive
- Significant contenders
- Overall winner
Best Design Overall
The overall winner for the 28th Technology Leadership Awards, is the Infinera team out of Finland, working with Jabil. They submitted an entry in the Telecom, network controllers, line cards category.
Design team
• Infinera & Jabil team
End-product
• L2/L3 router for disaggregated networks
Challenges
• Signal integrity, power integrity, cost, fabrication, assembly, test, reliability
• High-density, high-speed
• Multi-board constraints
• ECAD/MCAD alignment
• Multi-discipline concurrent design
Design flow
• Xpedition Enterprise
Comments from our industry judges:
- All of the judging panel were extremely impressed with this board.
- This particular design was amazing. The first thing that jumps out at me is its odd shape. That in itself poses a challenge in routing when you such a shape like this. The unique mechanical constraint of this board, many of the high speed signals had to work their way around some of these odd angles to go to the I/O off the board.
- This design is a combination of off the shelf parts as well as some in-house developed PCB assemblies, which required extensive use of 3D modeling and ECAD MCAD collaboration. That poses a lot of challenges, especially when you have so many diverse complex components and connectors.
- This was an amazing PCB, and definitely a worthy winner. This design combined everything in terms of the routing, in terms of the placement, a sort of crafted spread. It had a very impressive balanced stack, optimized for signal integrity, optimized to minimize EMC, and optimized for power distribution. Very complex, very dense.
- This team deserves recognition for overcoming some of the most complex challenges that face PCB design teams.
To learn about more about the other winners, keep an eye out for future blogs, or watch the announcement webinar with some of our industry judges here.
