ALBUQUERQUE, NM– Introbotics Corp. has announced the release of its HFT-1500 High Frequency Test System. The HFT-1500 automates the production test of PCB boards and assemblies and measures impedance, propagation delay, effective dielectric constant and interconnect loss. It is designed to meet the needs of the ATE probe card manufacturers for 100% test of their product and complex PCB manufacturers need for coupon testing.
 
“We are very happy to provide this new equipment with significant high frequency test capability for nearly half the cost of our top of the line system,” said Brian Butler, president of Introbotics. “This new equipment provides a huge advantage in test costs to anyone interested in measuring and reporting high frequency properties in a production test environment.“
 

MUNICH, Germany and WESTFORD, MA – Zuken has announced the availability of free footprint downloads for Altera's new MAX II CPLD FineLine BGA and Micro FineLine BGA packages. The MAX II CPLD packages meet the small form factor package and low power capabilities needed by designers of portable systems.
 

 
"As the number of I/Os in FPGAs increase and the solder ball pitch decrease, the ability to rapidly design and layout a multi-layer PCB to accommodate FBGA and MBGA packages becomes crucial, driving the demand for solutions such as Zuken's CR-5000," said Jim Smith, Altera's director of EDA vendor relations. "Designers can take advantage of the advanced capabilities within Zuken's CR-5000 to quickly and easily complete their designs and meet their go-to-market goals."
 

MINNEAPOLIS, MN – Minco has released its Flex Circuits Design Kit for engineers wishing to incorporate flex circuitry in their projects.
  
The kit includes a start-up guide that lists design guidelines, specifications and manufacturing procedures, illustrations and a glossary of commonly used terms. A sample case holds over 25 pieces of raw material and circuit examples.
 
“Although flex circuits are made to bend, most field failures occur as a result of these bending or flexing operations,” said Mark Finstad, principle application engineer for the flex circuits division. “To avoid failures, a designer must factor in all parameters that involve bending and flexing including bend radii, dielectric thickness and type, foil weight, copper plating, number of layers, and number of flexures.”
 
The kit also comes with an offer for a free mechanical sample of your design made with actual flex circuit stack-up materials. A mechanical sample ensures that a flex circuit is the right size and shape and is properly constructed for its environmental interfaces, which will help avoid installation problems, or latent mechanical issues that could cause failures.

NEWBERG, OR – WISE Software has released its VisualCAM product. It includes HyperNETLIST generation, which is said to increase netlist generation performance over other comparable competitive tools by 5-10 times.
 

 
Additionally, graphical netlist comparison performance has been increased five times over GT-Fabricator, while draw-to-flash conversion has been increased 5-10 times. A brand-new, fully automatic draw-to-flash conversion is now being offered as well, which is said to further reduce the amount of hands-on user time required to complete the conversion process. Improvements have been made to WISE’s paste mask stencil enhancement capabilities, offering greater levels of control during shape replacement. The increased control during shape replacement is designed to minimize the number of iterations required to achieve the desired mask results, further reducing the amount of time required to complete the overall task.
 
VisualCAM includes 100+ additional enhancements to core technology. Migration offers are available to those GerbTool users that wish to move up to VisualCAM, however WISE intends to maintain both product lines going forward.