Hi Yanfeng--
Thank you for your many suggestions. I am a little confused by your initial comments since you and your team seem to be prolific users of HyperLynx, and I think thousands of HyperLynx customers would disagree that we have "lost the last change". We take great care in determining tradeoffs on where to invest our time and energy to develop a tool that is the most useful for our customers.
As for your specific suggestions:
1. Merging HyperLynx DRC and SI/PI has been discussed, but I think you should keep in mind that the two tools, while complementing each other, are targeted at very specific tasks. HyperLynx SI/PI is a simulation tool, whereas HyperLynx DRC does electrical design rule checking. As such, the GUIs have been tailored to the specific tasks. HyperLynx DRC has a number of separate viewing windows to make it as easy as possible to navigate through DRCs and view them on the board, whereas HyperLynx SI/PI has more menus and wizards to guide users through the simulation process.
2. We have an integrated thermal solution built into DC Drop, which is incredibly fast. It is a non-CFD solution so it is not as general-purpose as Flo.pcb, but if you have a typical cooling solution on your board it works very well, and the tradeoff for performance is well worth it. We have made some improvements to the trace/plane heating algorithm in HyperLynx 9.3, and have gotten excellent correlation to a couple of customer test cases. If you haven't tried out PI/Thermal co-simulation in HyperLynx 9.3, give it a try. The fast thermal sim capability coupled with even more improvements in the DC Drop simulator performance makes the co-simulation very fast, orders of magnitude faster than any other co-sim solution in the market.
3. and 4. I would put the accuracy and speed of the Nimbic tools up against any other 3D field solver on the market. That is why we acquired them two years ago, and have been integrating them with our other analysis tools. The integration with HyperLynx BoardSim was greatly enhanced in HyperLynx 9.3, including the ability to export a 3D area and automatically generate appropriate ports, making it very easy to add a 3D model to your GHZ channel. On top of that, we have added the ability to pattern-match 3D areas on the board, meaning you can re-use 3D models (which take time to solve even in a fast 3D solver) throughout the board on similar structures, drastically enhancing efficiency. Here are a couple of videos on those features:
5. We are constantly improving our integration between HyperLynx and Xpedition - if you have some specific suggestions please log some Bright Ideas if you haven't already done so at: Mentor Ideas for Simulation and Analysis
In HyperLynx 9.3, we added to this by adding DC Drop to the Xpedition Analysis Client, which already had integration with HyperLynx DRC. If you are unfamiliar with this, it allows you to view analysis results directly in Xpedition as hazards, so that the layout person can directly correct any problems found by the analysis.
Thank you for your participation in the Mentor Communities.
--Pat