New portal provides engineers with CAD building blocks for semiconductor components

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIFORNIA September 08, 2015

SnapEDA, the fastest and easiest way to find and share CAD building blocks for electronics design, is today launching the DesignHub, a one-stop shop to explore CAD building blocks for components developed or curated by industry-leading companies. Collaborators in the DesignHub include Texas Instruments, GaN Systems, Accelerated Designs, Octopart, and Seeed.

The DesignHub shaves hours off design time and ensures maximal reusability by making it easy to search, find, and download computer-aided design (CAD) building blocks, such as PCB footprints and schematic symbols, from leading component manufacturers and providers. All building blocks export to major design tools, including Cadence OrCad/Allegro, Altium, Eagle, Mentor PADS, KiCad, and Pulsonix.

To provide transparency into quality, SnapEDA runs a diagnostic check on each CAD file to catch common manufacturing issues - such as silkscreen-to-copper overlaps, or poorly defined centroids - before they result in costly errors. Additionally a rating system lets engineers approve or flag parts.

The DesignHub was created in response to frequent requests among SnapEDA users for more manufacturer-provided or vetted CAD content to aid in the design of their printed circuit boards (PCBs).

Collaborators in the DesignHub are also popular among design engineers: Texas Instruments is a leading semiconductor company, and the most searched manufacturer on SnapEDA; GaN Systems is at the forefront of Gallium Nitride transistor technology; Accelerated Designs is a large library creator for the EDA industry; and Octopart and Seeeds curated parts lists are increasingly common ways of selecting components.

DesignHub collaborators further commented:

"What makes SnapEDA special is their ability to export popular Texas Instruments part libraries into different EDA tools that hardware designers use every day. This helps them find and bring TI parts into their designs faster," said Mark Easley, TI LaunchPad Applications Engineer.

"Gallium nitride power transistors have moved into the mainstream of adoption as designers dramatically reduce the size, weight and cost of their AC-DC, DC-DC and DC-AC power conversion systems. We are working with SnapEDA to provide designers with speedier access to data on our family of high performance power transistors" said Girvan Patterson, President, GaN Systems. "On-line downloads of design data in file formats compatible with industry standard computer simulation software are critical for GaN Systems customers."

"As one of the driving forces behind the DesignHub parts library, we feel it is a great way to provide the industry with PCB footprint and symbol data that is also vetted by the community. This reduces the chance for costly errors and reduces the time-to-market on new PCB designs. As the creators of the vendor-neutral BXL format, we also believe in giving engineers flexibility to work in whatever CAD tool is required for a design," said Frank Frank, President of Accelerated Designs

"The Common Parts Library lets makers and hardware startups move quickly by providing a list of commonly used and widely available components for connected device applications. We're thrilled that SnapEDA has joined the effort by providing symbols and footprints for those parts to help get them into PCB designs quickly," said Sam Wurzel, CEO of Octopart.

"The open parts library is a collection of the most commonly used components. This library will save time on components sourcing and shorten lead-times on the manufacturing side. We are grateful that SnapEDA has opened all the CAD files to different EDA tools, which will definitely benefit the whole community," said Eric Pan, CEO of Seeed.

The DesignHub can be explored at http://www.snapeda.com/libraries/.

About Texas Instruments
Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) is a global semiconductor design and manufacturing company that develops analog ICs and embedded processors. By employing the worlds brightest minds, TI creates innovations that shape the future of technology. TI is helping more than 100,000 customers transform the future, today. Learn more at http://www.ti.com.

About GaN Systems
GaN Systems is a fabless semiconductor company that is the first place systems designers go to realize all the benefits of gallium nitride in their power conversion and control applications. To overcome silicons limitations in switching speed, temperature, voltage and current, the company develops the most complete range of gallium nitride power switching transistors for a wide variety of markets. GaN Systems unique Island Technology addresses todays challenges of cost, performance, and manufacturability resulting in devices that are smaller and more efficient than other GaN design approaches. The company is headquartered in Ottawa, Canada. For more information, please visit: http://www.gansystems.com

About Accelerated Designs
We focus on providing Vendors, Distributors, Electronic Manufacturers and Engineers with vendor-neutral data for ECAD design, simulation and 3D modeling. The flagship product of Accelerated Designs is the Ultra Librarian, which creates and exports vendor-neutral ECAD data in a format that allows users to customize the data to meet their own requirements and the requirements of their customers. We also provide the industry's largest library of ECAD components - currently at 7.2 million parts and growing monthly.

About Octopart
Octopart is a Y Combinator-backed startup based in New York City and develops search technology to help engineers and scientists build the next generation of electronic devices. Octoparts flagship product is an electronic parts search engine that is used by hundreds of thousands of engineers to find and compare parts across different manufacturers and distributors.

About Seeed
Seeed is an open hardware innovation platform. We provide open source hardware products and small quantity manufacturing service with a design from manufacturing mindset. We are a strong promoter of the maker movement, value and lifestyle in China, by starting the first maker space and being the host of the full feature Maker Fairein Shenzhen. Headquartered in Shenzhen with operations in San Francisco and Taiwan, Seeed also sits in a unique position to connect between US and Asias maker and manufacturing community.

About SnapEDA
SnapEDA (http://www.snapeda.com) is web platform that provides millions of ready-to-use building blocks that accelerate electronics design. Built on powerful algorithms, these computer-aided design (CAD) building blocks can be downloaded instantly to an engineer's CAD software of choice, dramatically improving productivity. SnapEDA provides engineers with unprecedented transparency into the quality of CAD data, catching costly manufacturing issues before they happen. Thousands of engineers and designers in nearly every industry use SnapEDA to build better products faster.