Last year we looked at Shocking Technologies’ innovative new ESD protection approach. In it we noted that they have software that can identify where in your board layout you should modify the traces to narrow the gap to allow shunting of unwanted voltage excursions (aka zaps).

At the time, this was a standalone effort. The results were useful, but you had to incorporate them manually. They understood that further automation would be good, and was, in fact, planned, but it wasn’t available yet.

That has now changed.  Shocking recently announced that they have linked up with Cadence’s Allegro PCB layout tool. In fact, it’s not just a case of running the Shocking tool and porting the results over to Allegro; the Shocking tool is integrated into the Allegro interface so that it can all be managed in one place.

You can read more about this in their release.