For those of you on maintenance I recommend applying CADSTAR 11 patch 4 as it fixes some significant issues.  Chief among them is a side effect introduced in patch 2 with regard to turning off shapes on inner layers on non-contact pins and vias.  This side effect caused a major hit to performance on larger designs when inner layer pads were disabled.  Many other issues were addressed.  Note that this problem is also present in the first release of CADSTAR 12 and will be addressed shortly.

November 12, 2009: Zuken has just announced the upcoming release of CADSTAR 12.  This major upgrade will be available by the end of November.  As Zuken continues to drive higher level functionality from their enterprise class tools down into CADSTAR the power of this tool set continues to increase.  Specific information about functional enhancements in CADSTAR 12 can be found on the Zuken website.

To purchase CADSTAR or to download a free trial version of the tools please contact FOM Systems.

Zuken has many resources that may be downloaded here.

FOM Systems is pleased to announce that from November 1, 2009, we have been selected as the sales agent for Zuken’s CADSTAR product line for Ohio and Western Pennsylvania.  Zuken is offering 3 product bundles for their PCB design tools to fit customer requirements and budgets.  Even though CADSTAR  runs comfortably on a modest PC laptop with no special graphics or hardware needs, it has some features found only on some large and expensive enterprise scale tools.  Find out more about CADSTAR here.

CADSTAR is being offered in 3 different bundles to suit the budgets and needs of small to medium size enterprises.  Information about the tools and features in these bundles can be found here.

Zuken’s premier autorouting tool, Dragon, used in their enterprise scale tools is now available as an option for CADSTAR as well.  Dragon, when coupled with the high speed design tools in the CADSTAR Extreme tool bundle, enables creation of the most advanced state of the art PCB’s which require strict control of trace impedance, skew, and trace widths.  Design constraints are forward annotated from the schematic in addition to the constraints manager tool in preparation for routing.  Dragon is the fastest and easiest way to route strictly controlled buses like DDR2/DDR3 memory and front side bus signals between Intel CPU’s and their companion chips.  With the trunking feature routing differential pair buses such as SATA and PCIe becomes simple and automatic.  Read more about using Dragon here.  Signal integrity performance can be simulated as well.

Coming soon to our site:  Downloads of FREE products such as CADSTAR Design Viewer, a full featured program for viewing and printing CADSTAR design files.  There’s also CADSTAR Express, a design size (but not feature) limited version of CADSTAR that allows you to test drive its various features.  Designs are limited to a maximum of 300 pins.

For more information, or to request a quote, please contact us.