Customers Experience Speed Increases of up to 80% on PCB Designs Using Pulsonix 11.0

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Pulsonix, the electronic design automation (EDA) company delivering technology-leading PCB design solutions, has announced the release of Pulsonix version 11.0, which offers significant speed improvements by using the latest technologies available, as well as the introduction of new functionality for high-speed designs.

“Many of our customers are building significantly more complex designs resulting in the need for fast and efficient PCB design tools, ” said Bob Williams, marketing director for Pulsonix. “Version 11.0 makes a gigantic leap in speed, dramatically reducing the time it takes to perform many PCB design operations, such as design rule checking (DRC), copper pouring, and Gerber generation.” 

Significant speed improvements have been made by completely rewriting the underlying graphics engine to utilize the standard DirectX graphics and high-performance graphics cards such as those used in the gaming industry. “With these changes, some of our large designs are displaying up to 2.5 times faster,” said Olaf Hollinger at Carl Zeiss AG. In addition, multi-threading capabilities have been extended and added to many functions, meaning that speed is significantly increased on features that are processor intensive and that can utilize parallel processing.

“We've seen many improvements in this area,” added Hollinger. “As an example, we've seen DRCs that can be more than four times faster with multi-threading using my eight cores.” In addition to the speed advantage, the new graphics also improve the rendering quality of the design image being viewed.

Some of the other enhancements to version 11.0 include: 

• Same Net Via to SMD Check - This feature helps avoid technological problems during soldering of SMD components by ensuring a sufficient solder mask bridge between SMD pads and vias.
• Back Drilling for High-Speed Designs - Using an easily created rule set, back drilling can be defined for critical nets that require the removal of unwanted via or component pin stubs on through-holes. This can significantly reduce signal integrity issues and signal distortion.
• Differential Pair Rules - The ability to create differential pairs from rules automates a typically manual and time-consuming process, especially when working on designs with hundreds of differential pairs.
• Creepage Rules - These were introduced to calculate creepage paths for critical nets. This is needed to validate safety rules for specific designs, e.g., in medical devices.
• Extended Character Set (Unicode) - Extended character and internationalization support using the Unicode standard has been added, as well as character sets for languages such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.

“Version 11.0 is a remarkable step forward regarding performance and speed, which is very important for large designs,” added Hollinger.

About Pulsonix

The Pulsonix highly productive EDA technology suite has been designed to meet the ever-changing needs of PCB design in the 21st century and sets the new standard for the electronics industry with easy-to-use and learn schematic capture and PCB layout programs. The software engineering professionals at Pulsonix understand the need for high quality and fast response times, and use the very latest software writing techniques in graphics and data handling to produce best-in-class tools. Pulsonix was founded in 2001 and is a division of WestDev Ltd. Visit Pulsonix at www.pulsonix.com for more information.