Electro-Mechanical Collaboration

Major electronics companies share three common business drivers: getting to market faster, releasing more competitive products, and simultaneously keeping PCB development costs low. Facilitating collaboration between mechanical and electrical PCB designers throughout the entire design process, as incremental changes occur in either discipline, is a key strategy in meeting these business drivers.

Mentor Graphics’ ECAD-MCAD Collaborator enables this strategic collaboration throughout the entire design process as incremental changes occur in either discipline. For example, an ECAD designer can propose a change and transmit only the data necessary to illustrate the proposal to the MCAD organization, and vice versa for the MCAD designer.

Features and Benefits

Integration with Expedition Enterprise and Board Station XE

The ECAD-MCAD Collaborator is tightly integrated with Expedition™ Enterprise and Board Station XE ®. It also communicates to MCAD systems via the new Electrical Design, Mechanical Design (EDMD), ProSTEP-approved standard XML protocol.

Data Ownership and Communication

The Collaborator is designed so that ECAD and MCAD designers can work in the comfort of their own design environments, and quickly and efficiently communicate text and graphics transactions back and forth, as needed. The transmitted data is only the subset of the actual design data that is required to adequately communicate the desired change. The ability to do this is enabled by a new XML industry standard (EDMD) from ProSTEP. This evolution of existing STEP standards enables accurate and timely bi-directional communication of design change data between ECAD and MCAD.

True Collaboration

Once a mutual agreement is reached between ECAD and MCAD, the Collaborator can automatically make any required changes in the PCB layout. The ECAD-MCAD Collaborator allows true collaboration, replacing paper with digital data, providing opportunity for incremental review and counter-proposal, and automatically updating the respective databases with approved changes.

Shorten Time-to-Market

  • Consistent, iterative communication keeps design teams synchronized and avoids rework late in the process
  • Collaboration on what-if scenarios replaces time-consuming re-spins due to errors

Optimize Product

  • Collaboration enables ECAD and MCAD teams to optimize electronics within tight form-factor constraints while still meeting quality, reliability, and performance requirements
  • 3D visualization of the PCB and enclosure enables electronics designers to optimize the layout based on mechanical and manufacturability constraints

Reduce Costs

  • Fewer electromechanical re-spins mean less time per design and increased resource flexibility
  • ECAD and MCAD designers can collaborate from within their own environments without having to learn new tools

Toolbox

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