Micro Technology Services Inc. (Richardson, TX) is a contract engineering and manufacturing firm specializing in consumer and military electronic equipment. Its clients produce sophisticated electronics made up of high-pin-count devices, each of which requires a schematic symbol. These symbols are a fundamental element of the product design file, affecting everything from board fabrication to test generation. Engineers often spent days entering and manually verifying supplier data for each pin in a device. This labor-intensive process often resulted in design rework and board refabrication, slowing project completion considerably. The company's engineering team juggles several clients and projects simultaneously and was looking to automate the process of creating schematic symbols.

Recently, a defense systems manufacturer contracted Micro Technology to design electro-optical technology for night vision equipment. The design required significant processing power, which it obtained from a 950-pin field programmable gate array. Micro Technology began looking for an automated solution to help it meet the aggressive design schedule of the night vision project and to help save time and reduce costs across the entire organization.

Micro Technology implemented ChipData's (Richardson, TX) Intelligent Content Creation SymXpert software to automate schematic symbol creation. SymXpert automatically extracts and consolidates pin information from pin-out diagrams and pin description tables. SymXpert also eliminates manually compiling and entering data from PDF-based product specifications.

Micro Technology uses SymXpert to transform component documents into intelligent, ready-to-use schematic symbols. With the software, engineers can automatically create symbols in a variety of electronic data access formats, allowing the design teams to reuse symbols on other projects. It also identifies content errors, missing data and inconsistencies between data derived from tables and pin-outs. This ensures a high-quality symbol and an efficient design phase.

Within 3 weeks of using SymXpert, Micro Technology reduced its schematic symbol creation time by more than 95 percent. The software cut symbol creation time for the night vision project from 3 days to 1 hour, improving its schematic symbol creation time by 24 times. With a more streamlined design phase, Micro Technology was able to better meet the strict time requirements of the project, without overloading resources or pulling designers from other projects. With help from SymXpert, the engineering team has created a more efficient design process that can be implemented across its entire organization to shorten design cycles, save labor costs and improve client relationships.

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