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.

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.

Once a mutual agreement is reached between ECAD and MCAD, the Collaborator can automatically make any required changes in the PCB layout. In short, unlike other tools that enable only 3D viewing, 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.