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Transfer/Communication
10-2 Electronics Workbench
track of power and ground nets, and constrain them to be routed only on layers of the
appropriate type.
When the schematic has been prepared, the design will be flattened and consolidated, and
transferred to Ultiboard for board layout. In Ultiboard you design the board shape and size,
place the components on the board, and route the nets as copper traces on as many layers as
you like, placing vias to connect traces between layers. Ultiroute, and add-in product to
Ultiboard, is used to both place parts and to route traces automatically. Periodic animations of
the layout in intermediate autorouting stages help you to gauge Ultiroute progress.
The Multicap/Ultiboard libraries also contain full 3D mechanical CAD information for boards
and parts. A 3D view of the board enables you to quickly preview the mechanical properties
of the board. A small mechanical CAD package in Ultiboard allows for quick casing designs.
For larger jobs, the 3D board information can be exported to popular mechanical CAD
packages.
In order to enable better routing, Ultiboard and/or Ultiroute may wish to swap pins of
components (e.g., swap the two inputs of an AND gate), or may wish to swap sections within
a component (e.g., use a different gate in a QUAD AND chip). Multicap provides Ultiboard
with all the information required to do this.
Changes made in Ultiboard (either automatic ones or manual ones) can be "back annotated" to
Multicap. For example, if a component is renamed, swapped with one another, pins are
swapped, parts are deleted, and so on. The changes will be made into the schematic in
Multicap as well. Likewise, subsequent changes to the schematic in Multicap can be "forward
annotated" to Ultiboard, in order that progress to date on a board design is not lost if a small
change in the schematic is made. Both programs have a feature called "cross probing", which
enables parts or nets in one application to be quickly found in the other.
Taken together, Multicap (with MultiVHDL), and Ultiboard (with Ultiroute) provide a
complete end-to-end solution for circuit and PCB design.