An agreement with Accelerated Designs makes it easier than ever to obtain symbols and footprints for Digi-Key parts, no matter what electronic design automation tool platform you are using.
An agreement with Accelerated Designs makes it easier than ever to obtain symbols and footprints for Digi-Key parts, no matter what electronic design automation tool platform you are using.Digi-Key Electronics recently announced an exclusive, global agreement to distribute software and design data from Accelerated Designs. With its focus on providing engineers and electronics manufacturers with EDA tool-neutral software, Accelerated Designs’ products are used to create and manage symbols and footprints. This improves efficiency, especially in dealing with new components, when designing circuits and printed circuit boards, and when companies use incompatible EDA tools such as those from Mentor, Cadence, Altium, Zuken and many others.
The flagship Accelerated Designs product is Ultra Librarian; which EDA tools it exports to is a function of one’s license. Organisations or teams who maintain a central repository of common components or approved parts lists/libraries will therefore value this tool. Simply put, it allows individual engineers to use nearly any EDA tool they want to create their designs, while picking parts from a corporate-wide central repository.
Eliminate errors
Accelerated Designs uses Ultra Librarian itself to create libraries of symbols and footprints that it sells as bundles of components. Designers might not have to create these assets themselves and because there are many users of these parts, there are many eyes on the provided symbols and footprints. There is a strong reason to report errors and get them fixed when they are found. It can be difficult to find an error in a symbol and footprint when making them for oneself or for a few users. The cost to correct an error grows the longer it is undetected, with some printed circuit board errors going undetected until they are assembled and tested.
Digi-Key vice-president of application engineering, Randall Restle, said: “Digi-Key is extremely pleased to sign Accelerated Designs as a supplier. To our engineering customer base, this means you can obtain libraries of symbols and footprints for hundreds of thousands of Digi-Key’s parts, indexed with a Digi-Key part number, and compatible with your EDA tool. Nearly all popular EDA tools are supported, and Digi-Key remains committed to serving engineers’ decisions by remaining agnostic to the EDA tool platform they choose.”
Enhance efficiency
In all, Accelerated Designs has a library of components with 7.2 million parts and growing monthly. Hundreds of thousands of these have Digi-Key part numbers attached to them. Any part with an Accelerated Designs’ symbol and footprint has a link to download its symbol and footprint directly from its part detail page. In fact, Accelerated Designs allows Digi-Key users to download up to five symbol and footprint pairs for free for the EDA tool of their choice. Upon selecting a bundle, Accelerated Designs allows you to pick and choose the symbols and footprints you want.
Randall continued: “Our aim is to make using parts purchased from Digi-Key as efficient as possible. Accelerated Designs filled this gap in the industry. Finally, engineers can get a symbol and footprint for a device without having to create them by themselves.
“Manufacturers supplying Digi-Key also have a partner that can help reduce barriers to customers adopting their new devices. By working with Accelerated Designs to build libraries of symbols and footprints of their newest devices, Digi-Key will automatically distribute those design assets for them and on the web pages where they will be found.”