Zuken unveils the latest edition of CR-8000

Focusing on analysis and reuse, Zuken has announced the release of the latest edition of its tool suite – CR-8000.

The CR-8000 2021 release features more than 150 enhancements ranging from architectural planning, system-level schematic design and verification, 3D multi-board and advanced packing layout, through to manufacturing outputs generation. The release puts specific emphasis on facilitating improved design efficiency through the benefits of early analysis.

Particular attention has been given to fine-tuning the constraint and simulation capabilities in System Planner and Design Gateway, CR-8000’s engineering front-end applications. As electronic products become more complex, the need for early analysis has become more critical so the new enhancements make marginal design problems more detectable with more robust constraint definition capabilities.

For 3D multi-board layout and routing, Design Force users benefit from the new place by area, template, and reuse functionality that enables the application of existing placement and routing patterns on new designs.

As part of the early analysis focus, Design Gateway now supports the simulation of PCB parasitic effects in the circuit design stage through the ability to include parasitic element models in SPICE simulations launched directly in the schematic. The simulation model library manager comes in a new user interface and is designed to handle today’s volume of model data. Importing models from various sources such as IBIS, SPICE, or S-Parameters is presented uniformly.

In addition, signal integrity (SI) analysis functionality has been enhanced to support the execution of parameter sweeps across multiple pin models in one pass. A user can now explore the most suitable model parameters in a shortened timeframe. The SI Analysis also now considers a more accurate model for the surface roughness of the copper PCB material. The SI verification of differential pair routing now reports measurement results of crossing voltages in both tables and waveform display.

User productivity has been further improved by specifying automatic extraction and exporting of PI and EMI analysis results. Time-intensive analysis functions such as the IBIS AMI SerDes are now completed in less time.

Design Force benefits from numerous new functions to help organise and streamline large designs. Users are able to guide component placement for large boards based on schematic sheet component positioning. Exact placement and routing patterns from previous designs are reusable on new board designs with a new ‘Create Used Board’ function. By creating specific functions for manual tasks such as creating anti-pads (protected areas around through-holes) or solder resist subtraction, design time is reduced.

The integration of ANSYS simulation tools into CR-8000 Design Force has been extended to cover multi-physics analysis of multi-board designs to enable identification and correction of system-level design integrity issues. This new level of integration will reduce time-consuming and costly redesign efforts in advanced stages of the engineering process. With Design Force 2021, multi-discipline designs can be transferred to ANSYS in a single EDB file for analysis of multi-board designs, including mechanical chassis and enclosure data.