Evolving Toward Legitimacy
Tales of Piracy Gone Good
Rita Glover, EDA Today, L.C.
October 2002
My family has never known much about its geneology, so a few years ago
while traveling in Central America, I was amazed to discover that a possible
ancestor of ours had been a sea pirate in the Caribbean in the 1600s.
An Englishman named John Glover, he based his operations on a beautiful
atoll off Belize known as Glover’s Reef. He was paid by the British to
plunder Spanish galleons loaded with riches they had themselves robbed from
the New World. Even then, piracy was a way to penetrate a market.
It seems we later took a step forward on a path to legitimacy. When
I lived in Boston, Massachusetts, I discovered another John Glover, a naval
general in the American Revolution in the 1770s and founder of the U.S.
Marines. I frequently walked past his statue on the mall in Boston and
wondered about a possible family tie.
Now here I am in 2002, chalking up a twenty-year career of tracking the
electronic design automation industry. Still today, I see more than a
few instances of piracy, and it sets me to thinking about the effects, both
short- and long-term.
I recently talked with Bruce Edwards, executive director of Altium, the
Australian supplier of printed circuit board (PCB) software. The
company was founded in 1985 under the name Protel and changed its name to
Altium a few years ago after a series of mergers.
In its early years, Protel’s legacy PCB product was pirated into China
and Taiwan. At first, this caused the company great concern, because
it might sell only one product into these regions and have many non-paying
copies proliferated from that single copy. Protel sent in its
distributors to negotiate with the pirates, but they were rebuffed.
Finally, after many years of feeling helpless, Protel found that the
piracy actually had some benefits. In October 2001, Gartner Dataquest
surveyed China and ranked Protel (Altium) as the country’s most popular EDA
vendor in terms of tool usage and customer awareness, even though the
company ranks fifth in terms of market share.
Today, Bruce Edwards says, "We now attribute much of our popularity in
Asia to piracy." The company realizes that it was a blessing in
disguise, because it got the product into the hands of users and the
educational system in the region.
Edwards says that over time, as these designers are faced with more
complex PCBs, they are "coming in from the cold" and turning into real,
paying customers so that they can get product upgrades, documentation, and
technical support. They become willing to pay for upgrades, because
they need the latest tools to get their increasingly complex designs done
correctly and on time. To develop new end products, serious designers
find it is well worth the price to become legitimate.
Altium recently released Protel DXP (Design Explorer), which integrates
the different design technologies the company has acquired over the past few
years. This new product puts a full range of PCB design capabilities
within a single design environment —schematic entry, SPICE mixed-signal
circuit simulation, rules-driven board layout, signal integrity analysis,
topological autorouting, and manufacturing output — at a low upgrade price.
Another good reason to invest in advanced tools comes from Zuken, which
recently announced Board Modeler, a new PCB solution that resolves
electromechanical problems and reduces the number of iterations between
electrical and mechanical design processes.
Board Modeler provides a concurrent, collaborative floorplanning
environment that can import and export information from schematics, PCB
layout, and mechanical design tools. Developed for electronic products
that continually shrink in size while growing in complexity, Board Modeler
has already proven successful in Asia’s competitive consumer electronics
market.
Its new methodology eliminates duplication of effort between electronic
and mechanical design by permitting the electrical designer to import board
outlines, pre-placed parts, and other obstacles directly from mechanical CAD
tools. Board Modeler then exports the PCB outline and shape,
pre-placed components, and other mechanical constraints to the PCB layout
environment.
Zuken’s Board Modeler bridges the gap between electronic
and mechanical design. Board Modeler reduces iterations between
departments, decreases duplication of effort, and provides greater form and
fit accuracy. Source: Zuken
Following PCB placement, the design is imported to Board Modeler’s 3D
(three-dimensional) environment, where the simplified shapes normally found
in a 2D PCB layout system are replaced with accurate 3D component models
from Zuken’s online library of over five million components. This
creates an accurate 3D rendering of the entire electromechanical system so
that project engineers as well as mechanical and electrical engineers can
use the model to identify and resolve electromechanical problems early in
the design process.
Board Modeler’s checking utilities verify 3D clearances, and components
can be moved to resolve electromechanical problems. Changes are
back-annotated to the PCB layout system, and the final assembly is then
exported to the mechanical system. Board Modeler uses
industry-standard file formats to interface with virtually any PCB layout
and mechanical CAD system.
So while it is inappropriate for me, of all people, to criticize piracy,
the transition to legitimacy does represent progress.
Note: When Gartner Dataquest repeated its China study in 2002, the
awareness of Altium (Protel) dropped by about half, probably due to the
company’s name change.
Rita Glover honors her ancestors, whoever they were, while endeavoring
to shed light on the worldwide Electronic Design Automation industry.
She is president of EDA Today, L.C.
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