CALCE/RAMCAD for Electronics

The University of Maryland's Computer Aided Life Cycle Engineering (CALCE) research effort is aimed at developing techniques for design, analysis, prediction, and optimization of electronics with respect to a variety of design goals. Performance, producibility, reliability, maintainability, life-cycle cost, safety, etc., are the design criteria which are being integrated through the application of interactive heuristic and algorithmic design optimization techniques. The University of Maryland Reliability and Maintainability Computer-Aided Design (RAMCAD) research is CALCE and is focused on second- and third-level electronic package design with respect to interfacing thermal, mechanical, and reliability analysis. The goal is to make reliability and maintainability an integral, real-time, and upfront part of the design process, such that the need to resubmit designs will be eliminated. The motivation behind this project was the fact that schedule constraints are often compromising the effectiveness and efficiency of the design process. To achieve the goal of CALCE/RAMCAD, a cohesive and extensible design environment for analysis and tradeoff tools was developed. A system executive controller that integrates tools for analysis while providing system transparency, design data management, and process management was developed to guide the user through the design process and provide direct access to the design tools. These developments required the integration of computer-aided design (CAD), artificial intelligence (AI), and decision support (DS) techniques. Attention to human factors and the use of interactive graphics were also instrumental in the development.