Developed With The PCB Designer In Mind
The CADSTAR PCB Design Editor offers a powerful editing suite for your most challenging, complex designs. With everyday tasks made intuitive and often automated, the tool set within CADSTAR has been developed with the PCB designer in mind.

Interaction
Whether you're working with the product all of the time or just occasionally based on project requirements, CADSTAR always feels like you've never put it down. Throughout both Schematic and PCB design editors, menu items and options for common functions have been placed in the same location, ensuring that you have the tool at hand and know exactly how to use it. Right hand mouse key functionality is available for all commonly used commands. CADSTAR is very productive, letting you get your designs through the system rapidly. The same GUI makes it easier to learn and once you've mastered CADSTAR Schematic Capture, you'll find that common functions will be in the same place on PCB.

Placement
For designers who like or need to place components by hand, options which emulate the manual process have been incorporated. They let you place components around the board outline using one simple button push or place them in rows/columns with user defined criteria. Moving components using the cursor is simply a case of drag and drop onto the design. Selection for multiple moves or sequences is provided, as is the ability to dynamically optimize the connection length during move.

Point and click placement; automatic, semi-automatic or interactive... it's your choice with CADSTAR.

Routing
As part of CADSTAR's core technology, and at the heart of its automatic routing, are both the graphical routing editor and a dialog driven router. With complete control over the routing, even the most complex, tightest designs can be routed in the shortest possible time, saving time and money. Using the latest grid-free, spatial data structure technology and rules driven architecture, coupled with ease-of-use, Zuken's Route Editor is a great productivity tool for design engineers.

Analog Design
With advanced copper filling, split, partial and full copper power planes possible, analog design is made easy where precise control is required. These advanced features are incorporated into standard tools, which also include curved and mitered copper, cut-outs, hatching with flexible angles and non-uniform spacing. Teardrops which are user-defined in size can be placed on tracks, vias and pads, moving and rotating dynamically to maintain intelligent drops of copper. Curved tracks and automatic track fattening complete the professional analogue capabilities. CADSTAR is not limited to just one design type. It works well in all design worlds.

Manufacturing
CADSTAR supports manufacturing output formats for Gerber and extended Gerber RS274X, both included at no additional cost. For NC drilling, Excellon, Chinonburg and Sieb & Meyer outputs can be created using a user definable set-up file.

For penplots, check plots, dot matrix prints and laser prints, CADSTAR supports Windows device drivers - all delivered through a graphical post processing option and the ability for 'one touch' Post processing using the Batch Post Process option. The DXF format can be output using the post design processor and the DXF design I/O facility.

For assembly machine drivers and detail lists, a unique report generator facility is provided allowing you to customize reports and outputs using simple everyday language. No programming skills are required.

With links to industry standards built in, CADSTAR lets you design at a great advantage.