Zuken has announced the latest version of its design suite for electronics systems and PCBs, CR-5000 2009. This includes the official American and European launch of CR-5000 Design Gateway that unlocks enterprise-wide design for product development; major design quality improvements for CR-5000 Board Designer for layout design; and increased capabilities within the high-speed design and verification environment CR-5000 Lightning.

The CR-5000 Design Gateway

On September 24, Zuken announced the American and European launch of Design Gateway, the latest for advanced enterprise-wide design for cutting-edge electronic product development. This next generation circuit design creation package is the collaborating force between board level design and hardware design, bringing the two disciplines closer together. It also facilitates advanced product lifecycle management, becoming more and more integral to maintaining the competitive position of companies.
This solution is positioned within Zuken's CR-5000 enterprise-wide solution for electronics systems design and is at the core of its constraints driven design and verification process.

"Design Gateway forms part of a larger strategy that will see Zuken over the next few years breaking down the barriers of electronic product development from the system planning level down to detailed functional level, for harmonization between design disciplines with the objective of making great steps forward in quality improvement and design efficiency; all while empowering organizations to embrace the latest technology to deliver the most innovative products", said Chief Technology Officer, Kazuhiro Kariya.

Technology Overview

The development team focused on improving functionality for advanced electronic product design, and providing support for system level design and multi-board design. Design Gateway can represent the entire system as a hierarchical structure with unlimited levels, supporting both top-down design entry and building of blocks bottom-up. The solution also includes advanced features for design reuse, documentation, design variant management, simulation and verification, FPGA co-design, constraints control and provides interfaces to other design disciplines such as analogue and HDL.

In addition to Zuken's core PCB design community, Design Gateway was specifically developed with the hardware engineering community in mind, by opening up the flow of communication and design collaboration between PCB engineering and hardware engineering. The Microsoft Windows compatible standard also makes the solution exceptionally intuitive and easy for infrequent users, including hardware engineers.

For the project manager Design Gateway provides ultimate control in the system level design process, through the improvement of quality, prediction and reduction of risks, along with the ability to capture project costs up front. For the engineering manager it provides a conceptual design creation environment to boost productivity and improve efficiency within the CR-5000 environment and through native integration of third party tools.

Stepping up Design Quality with CR-5000 Board Designer

The version 12.0 of CR-5000 Board Designer will take users to another level in progressing design quality in the layout process. This has been achieved through enhanced editing functionality, collaboration and verification within the CR-5000 environment and selected third party solutions. It features capabilities for dealing with the latest chipsets with larger memories and complex space issues and advanced capabilities for verification to eliminate inconsistencies and detection of errors.

Low Effort High-Speed Design with CR-5000 Lightning

Ease of use and advanced capabilities have been the focus of development for version 12.0 of the high-sped design and verification environment CR-5000 Lightning. Highlights include the introduction of automatic 'escape routing' and 'smart fan-out' to simplify the routing process, along with support for S-parameter models, easy-to-use parameter sweep and waveform comparison functionality, along with improved error resolution capabilities for the latest high-speed boards.

Deeper Integration with CR-5000 System Designer

Zuken continues its commitment to CR-5000 System Designer and has focused effort on developing even deeper integration with other solutions in the CR-5000 design environment that help to improve product quality and communication with other electronic design disciplines while saving Design Engineers time.

Availability

All the latest modules within the CR-5000 environment are available. For more information about CR-5000 visit the product web site.
Design Gateway, revision 7.0 is now available worldwide, for more information visit Design Gateway.