The latest revision of Zuken's CR-5000 PCB and packaging design suite includes a number of enhancements, most notably to symmetry in trunk routing and modeling. Revision 9.0 of the CR-5000 suite also now includes the latest version of Zuken's Lightning high-speed design and analysis environment.
Zuken introduced the concept of trunk routing into the CR-5000 suite last year, but with Revision 9.0, that concept is taken further still. "Trunking" refers to the notion of handling sets of signals, such as buses and differential pairs, as single routing entities. This mirrors the way designers treat such sets of signals as composites that require a high degree of routing symmetry to minimize skew and distortion.
In this edition, more intelligence has been added to the CR-5000 suite's auto-interactive routing capabilities. Trunk routing of buses and differential pairs now includes enhancements such as multi-layer editing that shows previews of what happens to the circuit if edits are made. The tool performs obstacle avoidance with automatic reroutes; users can stop a route when an obstacle is encountered and restart it so as to clear the obstacle. Users can even restart the routing with fewer signals, effectively splitting the bus.
The inclusion of the Lightning 9.0 modeling capabilities in the suite enables users to perform complex via modeling, including resistance, capacitance, and inductance. Via modeling includes both automatic extraction of parameters from the PCB layout as well as pre-layout, what-if analysis. Further, the extraction of via inductance has been improved through the removal of the boundary condition that is inherent in the commonly published formula, which is critical for extraction for small vias.
Additionally, Lightning 9.0 now includes the ability to export S-Parameters representing net topology behavior and to export HSpice netlists. The S-Parameters can be used to model networks in microwave simulators. Other accuracy and usability improvements in this arena include the ability to skip a specified number of leading bits in eye-diagram generation. Additionally, some differential circuits require a "warm-up" period in which they settle into their nominal conditions. The eye-diagram generator now allows for that preamble period.
For pricing and delivery details, contact Zuken directly.
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