Zuken's new design solution aims to confront PCB complexity
SAN FRANCISCO — Zuken Tuesday (June 21) introduced a high-speed design solution aimed at helping designers cope with increasing printed circuit board (PCB) complexity.
According to Werner Rissiek, Zuken's general manager of engineering for Europe, CR-5000 Lightning is built on technology from Zuken's CR-5000 enterprise PCB tool. But Rissiek said CR-5000 also includes a completely new routing functionality that Zuken (Tokyo) basically created from scratch to help designers deal with higher density interconnect, an increasing number of board layers and buses, as well as other challenges posed by increasing complexity.
"We realized that these problems could not be solved by adding a few features to existing routing technology," Rissiek said. "This is a brand new approach. We really reprogrammed our routing tools."
The new routing functionality includes "intelligent object," meaning, in Rissiek's words, that the router "really knows what the designer wants to achieve."
CR-5000 Lightning also includes new routing features known as trunking, H-tree routing and interactive lengthening. Trunking addresses issues associated with handling different routes, busses, or differential pairs collectively as one entity. H-tree routing facilitates designing for tightly constrained, balanced H-tree topologies. And interactive lengthening provides faster and easier length and skew control.
Zuken said CR-5000 Lightning features frontloading of verification, which the company said would improve design quality and time to market. Frontloading of verification is achieved by advanced signal integrity and electromagnetic compatibility analysis at the routing stage, Zuken said. Problems that were previously impossible to check during prototyping can be verified and resolved one or two stages earlier, the company said.
According to Wolfgang Heinrichs, Zuken's general manager of business development for Europe and the Americas, CR-5000 Lightning's frontloading of verification can result in a prototyping time savings of up to 40 percent.
Zuken said integration, unification and process orientation are the key concepts behind the CR-5000 Lightning technology. The technology makes use of unified and shared design constraints, eliminating complexities associated with separate design and providing control for activities such as circuit design, floor planning and board design.
Pricing for CR-5000 Lightning starts at $19,800.
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