Mechanical and electrical engineers have historically had an uneasy relationship in the design environment. This is due, in no small part, to the unique development processes and design techniques used in each discipline. Subsequently, as the design environment moved to CAD, unique ECAD and MCAD tools developed.
With the broad number of products being created that involve both disciplines, today’s companies struggle with how to merge ECAD and MCAD into a common design. CAD vendors have answered the call by producing point solutions that bridge specific MCAD and ECAD solutions on the market. This has resulted in standards to ease integrations, such as the Intermediate Data Format (IDF).
IDF defines a specification for exchanging data between electrical and mechanical systems for use in 3D design and analysis of Printed Circuit Board (PCB) designs. This allows users of these systems to participate concurrently in the design of electro-mechanical products, resulting in development flows loosely based on the illustration below.
Here, we see the IDF file mature as the design evolves, advancing both design environments until the results come together, usually at the Product Bill of Materials stage. Numerous issues arise from this approach, including:
Inconsistent versioning across domain creates obsolete data – If a change in the design occurs at any point, all IDFs “downstream” become obsolete and must be recreated.
Lack of notification means data is not consumed in a timely manner – For example, MCAD makes a change to the location of a connector and forgets to notify the ECAD designer that he needs to make changes to the PCB via IDF import/export cycle.
No ability to selectively approve or reject changes – The movement of a flat IDF file back & forth between the disciplines makes tracking and propagating changes very difficult at any point in the process.
The 3DEXPERIENCE platform facilitates a new approach to this challenging development effort. First, the concept of point solutions is eliminated, as the CAD-agnostic “product” is the focal point of the ECAD/MCAD designer. Designers, regardless of discipline, work on a common product definition, regardless of the authoring source of the other data. Companies also are no longer locked into having the ECAD designer work in a specific MCAD paradigm or vice versa. A common product definition also eliminates the need to move IDF (or similar) files back and forth. Design cycles are reduced, and the ripples caused by imports and exports are removed, as illustrated below.
You also will note (in the illustration) that moving the electro-mechanical product design out of any particular MCAD/ECAD point solution, also opens up broader possibilities for simulation. As illustrated above, SIMULIA’s tools can be used to run a broad spectrum of test cases. This results in a truly “model-based” approach in the design process, which is a cornerstone of Configured Product Design on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform.
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