New Version of Zuken's CR-5000 Software Focuses on Technology, Infrastructure and Process Optimization

“Because of the software’s reliability and stability, CR-5000 has earned a reputation of being a high quality product among our customers. This means that the bulk of our engineering resources can be spent on customer requested enhancements rather than fixing defects. With this new release, we have continued to focus on customer requests and meeting the technology challenges of tomorrow,” said Steve Chidester, head of product marketing at Zuken.



System-Level Design Improves Hierarchy and Upfront Rules/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 organizations 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.



Faster Board Design with Integrated High-Speed Functionality



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. For both of these functions there is an obvious time saving, but the secondary impact is 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 leading-edge 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 organizations 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 wide selection of options to deliver better designs ready for manufacture.



New Power Integrity Software for Analysis of High-Speed PCBs



Zuken recently announced a new CR-5000 Lightning module for concurrent power integrity and EMC analysis within the PCB design flow. This new 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 optimization effort can be reduced by up to 40 percent.