Attendees at next week Z-DAC annual conference in San Antonio will get to see the newest product from Zuken called Design Force. The new tool enables single board, multi-board, and chip-package-board interconnect optimization in native 3D. Design Force is a single solution environment which includes embedded interactive and automatic routing, design analysis and constraint management.

Using the latest human interface techniques in a full 3D environment, the designer has control using a mouse in one hand and a touchpad in the other for two-handed design. The new user interface has been optimized to reduce time taken for menu picks, mouse clicks, and mouse travel distance, making it much faster and easier to use than comparable ECAD solutions. Throughout the design process, the designer can switch between 2D and 3D seamlessly to combine conventional 2D design with 3D design in real-time.

When first told of this solution I was a bit skeptical, thinking that using two hands would be too difficult to master. But, upon further review, it became clear that video gaming has contributed much to increase hand-eye coordination. In addition each user can configure the tablet and the mouse to allow his or her dominant hand to use the most active device.

Design Force was developed from the ground up by Zuken. It uses the newest hardware and software, native 64-bit, multi-CPU, and multi-threading, for the fastest ECAD system performance available today. It has fast graphics using OpenGL and DirectX, providing almost instantaneous rendering. With this graphics performance, designers can place and manage embedded components, view and modify layers, and optimize chip-package-board and multi-board interconnects, moving and editing seamlessly through multiple designs – all in both 2D and 3D. Multiple client-server implementations are supported, including cloud computing.

Design Force is part of the CR-8000 PCB design suite. Together with System Planner (system-level design planning) and Design Gateway (system-level circuit engineering) it supports concept-to-manufacturing multi-board design.