What's new in BoardTrace™ 3.1

Improved high resolution monitor support

View improvements

In the connection trace it was not possible to see the difference between a connected pin without a net or no connection at all.

In the above example signal ‘CAN_STBY’ is present in the Connection trace, thus connected to another board, however all other entries are empty. It was not possible to see that is connected to a pin on the MB1263 MPU Subsystem because there is no net attached.

In BoardTrace 3.1 an NC icon is shown when the pin is present in the connection, but is left unconnected. The tooltip in the circuit column will now show the connections.

FPGA support

The FPGA vendor Efinix with the families Trion and Titanium have been added to BoardTrace.

Intel FPGA pins listed in the pinlist as "RESERVED_INPUT_WITH_WEAK_PULLUP" or "RESERVED_INPUT" are no longer marked as as being unused.

PCB view

Connector mapping

The VITA46, VPX connector mapping has been improved for the ground pins in the both the differential and single-ended pin map. Additional checks have added for the utility plane signals of connector P0. Pins which should be connected to the same signal are now reported in the verification when this not the case.

Pins of connectors that use a transformation and which are not are found in the mapping file are only reported once. This error filter is automatically reset when opening a project. Such pins are all shown in the ‘Connection details’ and connect to (when present) a pin with the same name on the opposite connector.

CSV netlist export

A new command-line utility boardtrace_csv_export is present in the executables folder and can be used by vendors to create a partial CSV netlist of a complete board netlist. The partial netlist will only contain the specified connector reference designators and nets connected to them. By default, units that are connected to one of the selected designators that have exactly 2 pins (capacitors/resistors/...), will also be added to the output file.

If you do not want this add the -nolookover option.

The utility requires the BoardTrace environment but is not licensed. It can be used to supply customers with a CSV file describing the connectors and attached signal names, without handing over the complete netlist.

Usage: 
	bin/linux/boardtrace_csv_export 
		[-format <format>] 
		[-nolookover] 
		[-nopinlabels]
		<output file> <PCB netlist file> <designators>

<designators> is a comma separated list of reference designators.

In most cases the PCB netlist file format will be determined automatically. If this does not work you can specify the PCB netlist format using the -format option. Some common values for <format> are:

• AllegroPackager
• IntelISCF
• MentorBoardStation
• MentorGeneric
• MentorQCV
• Telesis
• ZukenRinf

Enhancements & fixes

• Extended Odd-Even transformation for connectors with 100 pins.
• Added module description for a Smarc module.
• Improved automatic detection of RINF netlist files (when extension is not .frs or .frp).
• Added Tcl commands:
   <net handle> pins
   <pin handle> net
   <pin handle> unit
• Disabled optimisations for constant part regular expression matching as this caused problems in some cases.
• Added float label, showing the cell contents in de detailed views, when the text is longer that than the cell width.
• Id 2213: HTML generation: show circuit type icon in connection details
• Id 2187: user option to disable beep when error message is sent to console.
• Id 2231: Zuken NDF parser now also adds pins that are not connected to a net and nets that are not connected to a pin.
• Id 2235: fixed crash when trying to uncompress ODB++ compressed file that was not in the required standard Unix compress format.
• Id 2238: Issue error message during project consistency verification if a microprocessor schema refers to a vendor that does not exist.

Try BoardTrace 3.1 now:

BoardTrace 3.1 can be downloaded from our website using the link below.

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