Zuken is not widely known in the US market, but this is about to change based on what I saw at their users meeting in San Antonio this week. Both the corporate news and the product news have pleasantly surprised me.

The Company

I did not know, for example, that with yearly revenue well above $200M Zuken is the fourth largest EDA company in the world. It is also second only to Mentor in market share. The company is 35 years old, headquartered in Japan with R&D sites in Japan, Germany (2), and Great Britain.

What distinguishes Zuken from the rest of EDA is its corporate behavior. A publicly traded company, it is the only EDA vendor I know that actually pays dividends to its stockholders while still investing close to 25% of its budget in product development. This behavior is clearly what the financial markets expect of a large, established company. Instead our US based publicly traded companies all still behave like startups, keeping profits officially to invest in product development. Even the undisputed industry leader, Synopsys, prefers to keep cash reserves that are close to 2/3 of its annual revenue instead of sharing with its stockholders. The days that its stock will see significant constant appreciation are over: it is a large company more subject to the behavior of the financial markets than to its competitive advantage in one or more niche segments of the EDA market.

Zuken seems to have understood how to be a reliable big company. It continues to grow and to reward its investors, both in the long term through share price growth, and the short through dividends.

Today Zuken has a leading market share in Japan and a significant presence in Europe. It is poised to make significant gains in the US next. Its products address the single PCB design environment with CADSTAR that competes with PADS, Orcad, and Altium products, and CR-5000 a high end product that competes with Mentor’s Expedition and BoardStation, and Cadence’s Allegro. In addition the E3 product addresses the harness and wiring market competing with Mentor’s Capital family of products. The new product just introduced, the CR-8000 has no competition at this point in my opinion, given its innovative technology and its total system environment. With CR-8000 I have no doubt that Zuken will become a well-known name in the US PCB market as well.

CR-8000

Although the reuse of some of the core pieces of CR-5000 will provide a comfortable upgrade path for those users, Design Force is a totally new module developed entirely inside Zuken. The goals established by Kazuhiro Kariya, Zuken’s CTO, for the development team, were to produce a module maximizing performance, functionality, and usability. In addition the design environment should integrate within the customer corporate IT infrastructure making corporate data immediately available to designers. Seeing the product in action I believe the goals were met.

Design Force is truly a 3D graphics product that takes advantage of the latest graphics engines commonly available in desktops and laptops sold today. The dynamics of the graphics are much more similar to those found in computer games than in engineering tools.

Designers have a true 3D view of their work and can switch environment very easily from working on the BOM to viewing the structural makeup of the product, to its electrical rendering.

One of the most intriguing characteristics of Design Force is the integration of a tablet as an input device. Although the human interface invented by Steve Job for the iPhone and the iPad is widely used in consumer products, it has remained absent in EDA tools. Zuken is changing all that and provides a tablet device with each Design Force license. Designers use both the tablet and the mouse to guide the tool, with excellent results. Although at first using two devices might feel awkward, people get used to it very quickly. Pan and zoom using the tablet is quite natural and the significant use of semantics information from the function being performed greatly minimizes the size of pull down menus needed to be selected with the mouse.

Design Force is truly the first leading edge PCB product released in the last fifteen years, that is since Veribest introduced Expedition in the middle 1990’s. Clearly PCB design has not stood still. The complexities of PCB products and the computing capabilities available have increased significantly since then, yet no new product has been introduced. Design Force is comfortable both in a cloud computing environment as it is on a laptop. It is a very complex environment that seems very easy to use, something quite difficult to realize. It is, in fact, a design tool every PCB engineer will want to experience.