During the sessions, a few of the Intergraph Electronics sales guys were taken out back, into R&D, and were shown the latest routing technology-eyes lit up with dollar signs as the VeriBest (now Xpedition) router was put through its paces. I was first impressed by this technology in 1994, when I attended the VeriBest PCB training and the sales kick-off in Boulder, Colorado.

And of course, PADS Professional includes all the standard features one would expect in a high-end tool.īased on Xpedition technology, PADS Professional is a major improvement over the previous PADS suite of tools.

All the essentials for today’s complex high-speed designs! Plus, I am looking forward to trying the dynamic plane generation feature-regenerating copper pours is always a pain to perform, in any software.

Opening the hood, we see an impressive line-up of features including signal and power integrity, thermal analysis and DRC support for traces violating split planes, reference plane changes and shielding. Let’s see how the Xpedition technology actually performs when integrated into the PADS tool suite. We hear all the hype about new EDA tools, but how do they actually perform on your design? This month, I road-test Mentor Graphics’ new PADS Professional and put it through a rigorous performance evaluation.

Mentor graphics pads professional