What's new in BoardTrace™ 3.3

The Vita VPX standard defines connectors which don’t have a direct pin to pin mapping. Depending on slot number and functionality pins have either an ‘n’ to ‘m’ relation (ground and power pins) or a one to one relation with changing pin numbers. Secondly the backplane connectors have more pins than the plug-in modules.

In the OpenVPX even differential wafer image backplane pins a, b, e, f and I are all ground pins and connect to plug-in module pins A, D and G. The wafer has 9 pins on backplane side and 7 on the plug-in-side. To fully verify and visualize these connections HDL Works has developed adapters. Adapters are placed between the connectors of the backplane and the plugin modules. Each used adapter is named an adaption. An adapter is a kind of simple netlist which is not shown in the Connection Trace and Netlist view.

The defined adaptions are shown in the Connections View. From this view you either view the complete adaption (by double clicking on it) or the individual connections. An ‘Adaption details’ view has been added to the detailed view to visualize adaptions. All pins which are internally connected to each other in the connector (like the ground pins) are shown in a group. Pins which are in the same group are always shown together with the group name. As the Plug-in module connector has less pins not all entries in a group show a pin number/signal name.

The adaptions details screenshot shows an adaption for the J0 – P0 power connector, where you can see that pins C3, D3, F3, H3 and J3 of J0 are all connected to C3, E3, F3 and G3 of P0.

All adaptions for a single VPX Plug-in module to a backplane (either 3U or 6U high) can be quickly defined using the ‘Add OpenVPX adaptions’ dialog.

Standard VPX adapters are:

• Power
• Differential
• Differential (half size)
• Single ended
• Single ended (half size)

Custom adapters can be added using configuration files.

PCB properties

The default behaviour of BoardTrace in the PCB view is to only shown connectors and components with a minimum pin count. This can be overruled with on the 'View filters page'. With a pattern for the reference designator and pin count you can either show or suppress components from the PCB view. On the PCB netlist patterns page you can now specify a single power and a single ground expression for each PCB schema

On the PCB netlist patterns page you can now specify a single power and a single ground expression for each PCB schema. This will make it easier to recognize uncommon power and ground names.