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70 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I MAY 2018 linear active components; fre- quency-domain simulation tends to be better at modeling the effects of capacitance and inductance. As board speeds increase, the significance of capacitance and inductance tends to increase rela- tive to that of non-linear device characteristics, but with tools such as Zuken's CR-8000, engineers can choose which domain to sim- ulate in, depending on the analy- sis focus. During the routing, this means that each element of track can be simulated as soon as it is routed, with the results fed back to the router. This means that the routing solution converges on a value that is within the constraints, rather than having to redo some, if not all, of the routing if one part is found to fall outside the constraints when the design is re-simulated after routing. Real time commu- nication between the constraint browser and the routing engine (Figure 6) allows the engineer to optimize routing results in an effi- cient manner. Figure 5: Signal integrity simulation of a net topology. Figure 6: Communication between constraint management and layout.