Zuken reveals future CAD enhancements.

BOSTON -- Quick: What's the fastest growing division at Zuken? Though the Japanese-based company is known for its stellar routing technology, the answer is Zuken's e-PLM unit, which includes parts and BoM management and Web-based collaboration, among other features.

Asserting that 70-80% of the cost of an electronic product is determined upfront during design engineering, Zuken has integrated its e-PLM line with its EDA tools and is pouring resources into expanding and improving design data management, choosing to buck a trend by maintaining its own parts libraries.

At its 2004 Users Group conference in Boston in early May, Zuken went to great lengths to drive this point home. One presenter, Pat Duran, an engineer with Philips Lighting, explained a company-wide initiative to standardize on a single component database and component management procedures. In doing so, Philips aimed to reduce cycle time for testing parts and eliminate PCB rework when designs were transferred among regions, Duran said. Philips settled on Zuken's CADStar, Duran said, in part because it offered an integrated environment between CAD and the component database.

Other sessions gave users (and prospects) a chance to comment on emerging technologies, such as embedded passives. Zuken used the opportunity to announce upcoming enhancements to CADStar 7.0 (rules by area), CR-5000 8.0 (material considerations, embedded parts and chip-on-board and wire bonding), and the Visula 7.0 and 8.0 suites (improved layout usability and DRCs, library reload and design cleanup), and tout a new tool for wiring harness design. The company is also teaming up with Tecnomatix-Unicam, which virtually owns the market for Manufacturing Process Management (MPM) software. In the small world of PCB EDA, Zuken is doing things a little different, and that's just fine with them.