Design suite for electronics systems and PCBs

This release sees the introduction of new core technology for power-integrity analysis, along with a range of developments to accelerate process optimisation and integration, including more efficient DRC checking, improvements in hierarchical design and management of constraint data.

Also released with CR-5000 is the latest version of Design Gateway, Zuken's premier system-level schematic design solution.

Design Gateway has been improved with more than 70 enhancements in hierarchical design, constraint management and interactive editing.

The use of hierarchy in designs has been widely adopted across different industries.

To reflect this, Design Gateway now supports different modes of design, including copied and embedded blocks, particularly useful for organisations moving away from the traditional shared block methodology.

The hierarchy functionality also provides page numbering, consistency checks when opening and saving the hierarchical circuit, plus comparison and updating functionality when dealing with source data.

To improve right-the-first-time design, Design Gateway's Rules Checker has enhanced checks for power and ground nets, bus bit count and bus bit order mismatches, along with pin information among design variations.

The performance of CR-5000 Board Designer has been enhanced in numerous ways.

The time to run a full DRC on very large designs now only takes a few minutes.

Generating copper areas and autocorrecting them as traces plow through or boundaries change is now much quicker.

Both of these functions mean that designers are able to perform these checks and updates continually throughout the design process with significant improvement to their daily productivity.

Zuken has incorporated some of its routing technology from the high-speed design environment CR-5000 Lightning into the core functionality for CR-5000 Board Designer.

This permits board designers to perform trunk routing and lengthening on buses or differential pairs directly in CR-5000 Board Designer with full constraint adherence.

For companies working with other organisations or sites operating on different revisions of the software, database compatibility between the versions has been streamlined.

By being able to jump back and forth from designs within any version, the design process becomes much more flexible.

To improve performance on a manufacturing level, the creation of tear drops on the fly is now much more advanced with a selection of options to deliver better designs ready for manufacture.

Zuken recently announced a new CR-5000 Lightning module for concurrent power integrity and EMC analysis within the PCB design flow.

This module, called CR-5000 Lightning Power Integrity Advance, enables PCB design engineers to perform advanced power-integrity analysis for AC and DC power-distribution noise at any point during the physical design process.

Design time is shortened by eliminating iterations and rework; for example, decoupling capacitor optimisation effort can be reduced by up to 40 per cent.