Engineers and design teams working on new PCB (printed circuit board) designs may want to take a look at the new version of CR-8000, available now from Zuken. If you’re not familiar with Zuken, they’ve been steadily producing electronics design automation software since 1976. CR-8000 has multi-user functionality that allows for efficient and concurrent PCB design. With designing a new PCB, reducing design time allows a company to bring an electronics product to market in less time. A bevy of 3D design improvements offer better organization and management of ECAD/MCAD tasks. Among the improvements are the ability to reuse designs, and a new functionality that enables earlier validation which in turn helps lower the total number of iterations and enhance the quality of design.
Zuken’s CR-8000 2016 is unique in that it is the electronic industry’s only 3D design solution centered around the product with architecture design features, concurrent 3D multi-board support, and chip/package/board co-design.
Features of CR-8000 2016
Work on the same design area at the same time with different teams
This concurrent multi-area PCB design feature means that different teams can modify a design at the same time, which helps speed up design times and tethers together teams that may be spread out all over the world. In this feature, every engineer can controls their point of view, viewpoint, while being able to see the whole design and remaining unconnected nets.
See highlighted parts in the circuit data
Improving part swap capability also helps reduce design time. CR-8000 allows superseded and highlighted parts to be seen directly on the circuit data, and they can be changed as needed by a group of designers and engineers. Manual checks for part swaps can take up a lot of design time, and not having to do them allows designers to start anywhere on the design and change parts as the design evolves without worrying about missing an instance of a superseded part.
New 3D ECAD/MCAD efficiencies
Now, when a user is working within the library at the component level, true 3D STEP models are defined. And if selected, a component 3D model will automatically integrate itself into the PCB design. Origin alignment produces a common point of reference between the MCAD and ECAD libraries as well as an alignment of the 3D shape to a component’s footprint. Users can output a 3D component model to MCAD of both whole and subset designs.
There are also new rigid-flex product visualization and design validation checks to make sure potential issues like the bend of the flex board can be modeled and collisions can be viewed. When the product is in its final state, this feature can help reduce pesky redesigns and reduce extra iterations between electrical and mechanical design teams.
Reuse good circuits and select modular blocks
Reusing good circuits can help designers save time and module attributes can be added to blocks for characterization which improves the efficiency of selecting blocks. Constraint arbitration is a handy feature that allows users to look at a particular section of a block and find conflicting constraints.