25102 PCB9: PCB Design and Verification for Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) Compliance (August 2025)

Supporting compliance with the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) by ensuring robust security in PCB designs can be accomplished through multiple strategic functions in modern PCB design software. This is crucial due to the increased risk associated with using connected IoT devices in home, factory, shop, or energy grid applications. The key areas of these functionalities include data integrity, secure component management, secure design constraints, design for security, resilience simulation and analysis, secure collaboration, and predictive security. This presentation focuses on security-related constraints, automated checks for potential vulnerabilities, and integrating electrical and thermal simulations to ensure resiliency. For instance, built-in security constraints enable hardware designers to specify rules early in the design process, minimizing vulnerabilities to cyberattacks. The presentation demonstrates how these rules enforce critical design considerations, such as clearance, routing isolation, and restricting sensitive data lines to inner layers. Especially for secure networks, constraints guarantee physical partitioning and isolation to prevent cross-coupling. This is critical, as cross-coupling can introduce vulnerabilities and data leakage. Although constraints are applied from the start, automated design verification using electromagnetic solvers and electrical checks is necessary to confirm the final design. The seamless integration of simulation solutions in modern PCB design systems provides automated verification of electrical integrity and EMC, thus ensuring the PCB layout is resilient against side-channel attacks or interference. Nets crossing gaps or splits, and those near board edges, are typical examples that modern automated checks identify and flag as potential vulnerabilities related to data paths. Similar checks will also be demonstrated for PCB grounding schemes and differential signaling, essential for cybersecurity compliance. This establishes a robust design foundation for more advanced checks, including electrical and thermal co-simulations or enhanced signal integrity checks. Thermal and electrical resilience reduce the risk of hardware-related vulnerabilities and downtimes, while advanced signal integrity checks ensure error-free signal paths. Addressing these three main areas—security constraints, automated vulnerability checks, and integrated simulation—accelerates CRA compliance, reduces design cycle time, facilitates early detection of vulnerabilities, and enhances product trust.