A partnership between Synopsys and Zuken will focus on developing an integrated and robust printed-circuit-board (PCB) design and simulation tool suite. The pair plans to combine two complementary product lines, Synopsys’ Saber Simulator and Zuken’s CR-5000 System Designer, which will amount to a platform for integrated system-level electronic design, simulation, and verification. Zuken and Synopsys have also established an In-Sync agreement enabling mutual promotion and development work.

The companies agreed to develop a new, tightly integrated interface between Zuken’s CR-5000 System Designer and Synopsys’ Saber Simulator for analog and mixed-signal board-level design. Development teams from both companies will use Synopsys’ Frameway technology, which has been used to successfully integrate the Saber Simulator with other third-party environments, to create a bidirectional interface between the complementary toolsets. Customers will use System Designer to create their designs, and then directly launch Saber simulations from within the CR-5000 environment. This approach eliminates potential errors by connecting the design implementation, simulator, and results analysis within a common interface. Results will be analyzed in Synopsys’ CosmosScope waveform analyzer.

Synopsys’ Saber Simulator is a powerful modeling and simulation environment used to simulate, analyze, and verify system interactions between multiple physical domains (electrical, magnetic, mechanical, thermal, and hydraulic). With its advanced time-domain and frequency-domain analyses, comprehensive model libraries, multi-language modeling tools, and powerful waveform analyzer, designers can optimize their designs for performance, reliability, and cost.

CR-5000 is Zuken’s scalable PCB and advanced packaging layout suite created for the small-to-large enterprise market. It enables rules applied early in the design process to be maintained through to manufacturing. System Designer, the design creation part of Zuken's CR-5000 layout suite, is a graphical tool for design capture and analysis. It supports a wide range of graphical and textual design entry methods and is suited to digital, analog, and mixed-signal circuit design at both the system and PCB level. The tool is tightly linked to synthesis, simulation, timing analysis, verification, and debugging throughout the design process.