October 25, 2011 ? Munich, Germany and Westford, MA, USA ? Zuken today announces CR-8000, a new PCB design product family that is specifically designed for system-level multi-board design. The CR-8000 suite is the only concept-to-manufacturing, multi-board design solution that has been developed from the start to address the unique requirements of today’s ever-increasing challenges in system-level design optimization.

The suite’s fully integrated design flow ranges from initial system planning, where critical design decisions are made about design partitioning, component selection, and form, fit, and function of the product or system; through detailed schematic and PCB design; and optimized manufacturing output.

All of the products in this flow inherently support and facilitate multi-board design for system level design optimization:

• System Planner – a system-level design environment for up-front planning and partitioning of electronics systems.
• Design Gateway – an engineering platform for logical circuit design and verification of single and multi-board system-level electronic designs.
• Design Force – a system-level IC package and PCB design and analysis solution combining conventional 2D design with 3D design in real-time using the latest human interface techniques.
• DFM Center – a comprehensive manufacturing preparation and output solution supporting panelization and common output formats.

“In the process of researching CR-8000, we found that system design cannot only be single board design, as in the past,” says Gerhard Lipski, general manager Zuken Europe and Americas, and member of Zuken’s board of directors. “It had to handle multi-board design throughout the flow. But we realized that to do it right we had to start again. This not only optimizes our solution for today, but gives us the ability to keep up with future advances much more easily.”

Future-proof design technology

Over the last decade, there have been numerous technology advances that enable a major step forward in PCB system design. CR-8000 has been designed from the start to take advantage of the latest advances in hardware and software technologies to offer unmatched user productivity and system performance. CR-8000 includes the latest in:

• human interface techniques – a mouse and a touch pad combine for fewer mouse clicks and movements, minimal dialogs and panels
• hardware – using 64-bit, multi-thread and multi-CPU
• graphics – through OpenGL and DirectX
• network environments – with standalone client, data server, application server and cloud computing support.

All of this combines to form a solution whose performance stands out from the competition and offers companies a competitive edge in their product design.

For more information, visit www.zuken.com/cr-8000.