A recent consumer review by Deloitte reported that 1 in 5 consumers are willing to pay 20% more for a personalized or customized product. Not only that, almost half of consumers (46%) are willing to wait longer to get their customized product or service.
As an increasing number of companies are striving to meet this demand for product customization, the ability to efficiently handle PCB design variants becomes critical. Back in the day, PCB designers had to create a separate design for each board assembly when working with multiple variants even when the differences were minor (e.g. differences in the value of a resistor). This is because each assembly requires its own documentation; however, this method also introduced a lot of overhead and the possibility of design errors. For example, if a PCB design had 10 variations with everything else in the design is the same except for the values of a resistor (e.g. R5). A designer would have to create 10 separate designs with its own database. Consequently, if there were a change in the PCB design common to all 10 variations, the designer would have to replicate that change in all 10 designs. This is time-consuming and requires immense focus to ensure that design integrity is maintained between the designs.
Fortunately, now most ECAD applications have the ability to handle design variants without the need to duplicate the entire PCB design. For example, Altium Designer has the ability to create variations of the same base PCB design. Users can define any number of variations of the board design, where each component may be configured as:
- Fitted to the board: this is the default state of a component before any variations are applied.
- Not fitted to the board: this component will not be included in the appropriate output documentation, such as the bill of material.
- Fitted with Varied Parameter(s): this component is included on the board, but with modified component parameters, such as its value.
- Alternate Part: this component is a completely different part such as an alternate part, which may or may not have the same footprint.
Beginning in R2021x FD03, Collaborative Designer for Altium allows users to assign alternate parts that are stored in 3DEXPERIENCE by maintaining a local component database (*.DBLib) that is synchronized with the parts in 3DEXPERIENCE (see an example in the image below). When the user saves the design to 3DEXPERIENCE, the design variants are saved as well. The local component database also allows users to choose 3DEXPERIENCE components while offline regardless if design variants are used.
To find out more about how ENOVIA's Collaborative Designer for Altium can improve the productivity of designers using Altium Designer, please visit www.3ds.com.
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