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PCBD-Feb2016

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16 The PCB Design Magazine • February 2016 by Andy Shaughnessy I-ConneCT007 Since its inception in 2001, the UK-based Pulsonix PCB design tool has become popular across the pond, and parent company West- Dev plans to expand its market share in North America. I caught up with Bob Williams, mar- keting director of Pulsonix, and asked him to discuss some of the company's newest tools and technologies. Andy Shaughnessy: Tell us about some of the new PCB design tools at Pulsonix and some new tech- nologies that you're excited about. Bob Williams: In Q2 of 2016, we will be releas- ing Version 9 of Pulsonix. The focus in this re- lease has been on two key areas of the product: the interactive high-speed design capability and the addition of a Vault for revision/version con- trol of Pulsonix-related documents. These addi- tions have come directly from listening to our customers and understanding their changing needs. Version 9.0 is the first in a series of large developments for the product which will fur- ther accelerate our progress in the USA as well as other markets. Looking ahead, we have new technologies in the pipeline which will benefit our users and significantly move the product on in terms of its underlying structure and capabilities. Shaughnessy: What's new in the Pulsonix tool? Williams: We have quite a few high-speed de- sign enhancements. Engineers will benefit from the expansion of the constraint rules manager within Pulsonix, which incorporates a higher level set of complex rules for today's high-speed designs such as DDR3 and DDR4. Using new intelligent interactive dialogs, users can define paths that rules will be applied to, ensuring length matching across multiple signal paths. Although these rules can be com- plex in their nature, the Pulsonix rules manager enables rules to be easily created allowing users to dramatically reduce creation time by apply- ing one rule to multiple nets. Features to inter- actively create complex signal paths, differen- tial pair chains, matched differential pairs and branched net rules have also been added. A new dynamic serpentine tool has been added to interactively apply serpentine rules to existing tracks. Rules controlling the am- plitude, separation, skew and gap can be con- feature interview with Bob williams ...at Pulsonix

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