"ECAD/MCAD Collaboration Solutions: Integrating Mechanical and Electrical Product Design"

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"The Pro/ENGINEER ECAD-MCAD Collaboration Extension can help you overcome these obstacles and improve design collaboration between electrical and mechanical designers. PTC is the only MCAD vendor offering this new technology, which leverages both Pro/ENGINEER and ProductView."
Source: PTC

Resources Related to ECAD/MCAD Collaboration Solutions: Integrating Mechanical and Electrical Product Design:

• Pro/ENGINEER (Wikipedia)

ECAD/MCAD Collaboration Solutions: Integrating Mechanical and Electrical Product Design

This CIMdata-authored ECAD-MCAD collaboration Solutions Product Review describes product offerings from PTC and Mentor Graphics that help companies develop electro-mechanical designs regardless of industry sector. This paper provides an overall description of collaboration between the Electronic Computer Aided Design (ECAD) and Mechanical Computer-Aided Design (MCAD) disciplines and presents issues and benefits as well as CIMdata's assessment of the ECAD-MCAD collaboration solutions of PTC and Mentor Graphics.

1. Executive Summary

PTC and Mentor Graphics have developed their own sets of ECAD-MCAD collaboration solutions that can also work together. These are the first two companies to develop solutions that adopt the new ECAD-MCAD data exchange format introduced by ProSTEP. These ECAD-MCAD collaboration solutions support the engineering design process for products that combine both electrical and mechanical content. They help engineers design products in the context of both disciplines, allowing them to make more thorough and informed product design decisions. These ECAD-MCAD collaboration solutions also support active collaboration throughout the design process, allowing more design innovation and facilitating engineering change processes. This is very important since the electrical and mechanical design processes in most companies are carried out by different teams who typically work in isolation from each other and who use different methods to produce their portions of the product design. Communication among the members of these teams is critical to producing high-quality products that meet the requirements of customers.

The bottom line is that, while these tools are still under development, the benefits of implementing an ECAD-MCAD collaboration strategy today supported by the tools described in this paper can bring both positive and broad reaching benefits. Companies can realize many benefits, not only financial, but in improving product design quality when they broadly adopt ECAD-MCAD collaboration solutions as part of their enterprise strategy.

2. Introduction

Electro-mechanical design continues to gain in importance because a majority of products produced today contain both electrical and mechanical components and systems. As the number of electro-mechanical interactions in products increases, the ability to design and simulate these products collaboratively across both domains becomes essential to producing correct, high quality products. In the past, electrical and mechanical design activities were operated quite separately with little interaction between the two disciplines. As more products are being designed with electro-mechanical components, significantly adding to the interdependency between the two domains, companies have realized that a more comprehensive design strategy is necessary; a strategy that allows much more interdisciplinary innovation by providing ways for the disconnected engineering disciplines to work more closely together.

Thus, collaboration between the mechanical and electrical design disciplines becomes a critical factor in supporting product development. This is especially true as companies continue to design more complex products that need to fit in smaller packages, where interferences among mechanical and electrical parts becomes a critical and complex issue, leading to problems that can be efficiently resolved only through close cooperation among all of the product's designers. Two critical issues impact companies' abilities to collaborate more effectively: disparate design solutions and the cultural divide between design disciplines.

Traditional design solutions in these two disciplines do not communicate well with each other. That is, the tools used by the different designers do not share data that is critical to working together in a collaborative design process. Since the design solutions for each discipline are developed by different solution providers using quite different data formats and constructs, some form of data sharing and exchange are required to enable collaboration. The closer the integration, the tighter and more productive the collaboration will be.

Virtual product simulation and validation is also an important capability for analyzing how products work. Today, simulations of products are domain specific. That is, the mechanical discipline simulates assembly motion, heat transfer, structure, etc. Likewise, the electrical discipline simulates printed circuit board interactions such as signal interference, heat dissipation, and other electrical factors. These two sets of simulations are not integrated in today's CAD solutions so that the necessary interactions between the electrical (controls and circuits) and mechanical (enclosures, actuators, motors, switches, etc.) cannot be fully simulated in the virtual design environment.

simulates printed circuit board interactions such as signal interference, heat dissipation, and other electrical factors. These two sets of simulations are not integrated in today's CAD solutions so that the necessary interactions between the electrical (controls and circuits) and mechanical (enclosures, actuators, motors, switches, etc.) cannot be fully simulated in the virtual design environment.

This paper provides CIMdata's perspective on ECAD-MCAD collaboration; the motivations for its use, its value and future, as well as CIMdata's views on a set of solutions based on ProSTEP's EDMD Schema. The following sections address:

• ECAD-MCAD Collaboration-a brief review of the impacts and value derived from the use of ECAD-MCAD collaboration within an overall PLM (see sidebar) strategy.
• ECAD-MCAD Collaboration Solutions-a brief perspective on ECAD-MCAD collaboration solutions, along with a description and CIMdata's assessment of PTC's solution that allows Pro/ENGINEER to be integrated with many ECAD tools including Mentor's, and a tighter integration of Mentor Graphics' Expedition Enterprise and Board Station XE workflows with MCAD tools including PTC's.
• Summary and Concluding Comments-a brief summary of the paper along with concluding remarks.

3. ECAD-MCAD Collaboration

Clearly, the desire to more effectively integrate electrical and mechanical design and analysis into an increasingly collaborative and innovative product development process is driving companies to demand solutions that address the business problems and pressures described in the previous section.

A number of engineering processes are supported by collaboration. Engineering change evaluation and approval is one obvious example, but collaborative techniques are also important to foster product innovation by allowing product development to be undertaken in a knowledge-sharing environment where the expertise of various disciplines can be readily shared and acted upon from the conceptual stage through to the end of development. The keys to collaboration are ready access to valid information and fluid communication among the collaborating participants. These are supported by technologies such as those described in this paper.

While the issues are fairly clear, any solution to them remains problematic due to a number of business and process challenges.

PLM-Product Lifecycle Management

PLM is a strategic business approach that applies a consistent set of business solutions in support of the collaborative creation, management, dissemination, and use of product definition information across the extended enterprise, and spanning from product concept to end of life-integrating people, processes, business systems, and information. PLM includes data management, process management, CAD/CAM, engineering analysis, data communication, and other aspects of product development.

3.1 ECAD-MCAD Collaboration Challenges

There are some interesting challenges for companies that want to effectively implement ECAD-MCAD collaboration. It is important to take advantage of lessons learned from implementing other major aspects of PLM so that the benefits of ECAD-MCAD collaboration can be maximized. Some of the most valuable include:

• Different Solution Suppliers-None of the CAD solution providers have products for designing both electrical and mechanical product elements. Therefore, the most efficient collaboration environment will have to work with data from products of two or more vendors.
• ECAD and MCAD Data Models are Different-The basic formats and constructs of data used in the two disciplines are quite different. ECAD solutions generally do not deal with 3D data, especially for 3-dimenional electrical components such as resistors, IC chips, etc. However, 3D data is the prevalent format used in the mechanical design process. In order to support collaboration with mechanical design, electrical component libraries have to be modeled in 3D, or at least 2-1/2D, and be shared with the mechanical design system.
• Designers Have Not Worked Across Disciplines-The two groups of designers have had very limited capabilities to collaborate in the past. They are not used to working together and may be reluctant to share their data with others. Thus, changes proposed by one discipline could not always anticipate the needs of the other. It is critical that the people working in each discipline understand that their responsibilities do not change when they are collaborating; that they retain their customary responsibilities for their parts of the design while gaining more pertinent information much faster.
• Update Processes-Re-thinking the processes and proactively addressing cultural issues and organizational barriers to take advantage of collaboration are essential tasks.
• Update Processes-Re-thinking the processes and proactively addressing cultural issues and organizational barriers to take advantage of collaboration are essential tasks.
• Extract Early Value-Demonstrating value early results in huge gains in internal support for programs like ECAD-MCAD collaboration.
• Library Synchronization-Synchronization merges common aspects of the MCAD and ECAD libraries that for all practical purposes remain largely disconnected from each other.
• Analysis and Simulation-Full system simulation as part of the ECAD-MCAD collaboration experience, provides more product understanding and validation than when performing portions of these separately in each domain.

Of course, there are many other steps that can be taken to ensure success. As for any large-scale information system-based program, effective program management, executive commitment, adequate budgets, and resource commitments are all essential for success. The value to be derived from ECAD-MCAD collaboration will make all of these efforts very worthwhile.

3.2 ECAD-MCAD Collaboration Value

There are many ways in which companies can reap benefits from collaboration. The overall opportunities for business value enhancement include:

• Improve Change Control-Collaboration helps coordinate changes between disciplines to decrease the time needed to implement changes and reduce errors when making changes.
• Avoid Rework-Improving communication through collaboration helps avoid design errors that can result in very costly rework, especially those that occur late in the product development process when they have much larger cost impacts.
• Improve Quality-Collaboration allows designers to try more iterations, which can lead to better, higher quality products.
• Improve Product Design-A systems-level simulation environment in which electrical controls are coupled to and simulated with mechanical devices also increases the likelihood that design flaws will be discovered earlier, improving quality and allowing more time for innovation.
• Support Faster Design-Allowing early simulation and evaluation of design decisions speeds up the design process and minimizes unnecessary disruptions to the rest of the team when decisions are made later in the process.
• Faster Time-to-Production-Speeding up overall design time by improving communication, facilitating decision-making, and reducing errors allows products to be delivered to production earlier.
• Increase Innovation-Using collaborative interactions allows people to try more new concepts.

4. ECAD-MCAD Collaboration Solutions

PTC and Mentor Graphics have both developed solutions that help support collaboration between the electrical and mechanical design groups. One of PTC's solutions can be used with any of the ECAD printed circuit board (PCB) design tools while the other solution creates a direct, fairly tight integration with the ECAD tools that have adopted ProSTEP's EDMD schema. The same holds true for Mentor Graphics, as they provide a general data exchange capability with all MCAD tools as well as a tightly-integrated collaborative capability through EDMD. At this time, PTC and Mentor Graphics are the only ECAD and MCAD vendors who appear to have adopted the EDMD standard. Both of PTC's approaches take advantage of Pro/ENGINEER for mechanical design, ProductView for visualization, and Windchill for data and process management (although Windchill is not required, it provides a more managed solution).

ProSTEP's EDMD schema. The same holds true for Mentor Graphics, as they provide a general data exchange capability with all MCAD tools as well as a tightly-integrated collaborative capability through EDMD. At this time, PTC and Mentor Graphics are the only ECAD and MCAD vendors who appear to have adopted the EDMD standard. Both of PTC's approaches take advantage of Pro/ENGINEER for mechanical design, ProductView for visualization, and Windchill for data and process management (although Windchill is not required, it provides a more managed solution).

ECAD-MCAD collaboration relies on exchanging data so that PCB ECAD data and 3D MCAD models of mechanical assemblies can be viewed together, in the context of a complete electro-mechanical product design. Support for engineering change processes in the product design also requires bi-directional exchange of the design data between the ECAD and MCAD worlds to provide the initial baseline design as well as any WIP changes as they occur throughout the design process.

ECAD-MCAD collaboration relies on exchanging data so that PCB ECAD data and 3D MCAD models of mechanical assemblies can be viewed together, in the context of a complete electro-mechanical product design. Support for engineering change processes in the product design also requires bi-directional exchange of the design data between the ECAD and MCAD worlds to provide the initial baseline design as well as any WIP changes as they occur throughout the design process.

One issue for users is that while the EDMD schema can transport 3D data, there are not uniform ways to create 3D representations of the 2D electrical components. Users have to create the 3D form of this data so that the mechanical designers can do some critical tasks. First, 3D data is needed to perform accurate clearance and interference analyses, especially when the PCB is embedded in a small enclosure such as a cell phone. Another area where this is important is airflow and heat analyses, in which the mass and shape of the components on the PCB can be a major factor. The PTC and Mentor Graphics solutions do not provide either a shared library of 3D electrical components or an automated method of developing these from the ECAD data.

An important aspect of an IDX file is that it can carry incremental changes to the data, that is, all of the data that defines the PC board does not have to be exchanged every time some portion of the data changes. This is a major improvement over the IDF data exchange format that is less compact and can only send full data sets. Incremental data is critical to achieving nearly real-time collaboration and for improving engineering change processes.

An important aspect of an IDX file is that it can carry incremental changes to the data, that is, all of the data that defines the PC board does not have to be exchanged every time some portion of the data changes. This is a major improvement over the IDF data exchange format that is less compact and can only send full data sets. Incremental data is critical to achieving nearly real-time collaboration and for improving engineering change processes.

4.1 ECAD-Independent Solution

This solution and methodology supports situations in which the ECAD solution has not been tightly integrated with Pro/ENGINEER. In Figure 1, the PCB assembly Authoring Tool is Pro/ENGINEER, while the PCB layout Authoring Tool could be any of a number of PCB design solutions. These two tools perform the functions that they normally do: mechanical design and electrical design respectively. The designers from these two disciplines work within their familiar tool environments. They do not need to know anything about how the other design tool works.

In support of collaboration between the two disciplines, for instance to investigate the impact of an engineering change, the viewing components and a common data format are added. These are required so that the ECAD designers can see and interrogate the MCAD data and vice versa. In this scenario, either the IDF or the EDMD open schema can be used to support the exchange of data. When the EDMD schema is used, Pro/ENGINEER can directly receive positioning information entered by the ECAD user that helps the MCAD user know how to move elements such as components and keep-out/in areas.

The key here, as well as in more tightly-integrated ECAD-MCAD collaboration solutions, is that the electrical designer can see what the mechanical designer has done in 3D. Likewise, the mechanical designer can see the board layout and its components. Thus, when either designer proposes a potential change, both disciplines can assess any impacts on the design before the change becomes permanent. In addition, changes can be shared with others working on the same project.

For example, if the electrical designer proposes a component move so that it interferes with a hole or mounting bracket, then the mechanical designer can unambiguously see the change in his 3D environment as well as within the 2D ECAD view and react to it, either by moving the interfered-with mechanical component or by requesting that the electrical designer move the electrical component so that it no longer causes an interference. In this case, the electrical designer can view the 3D mechanical design to help understand the mechanical designer's concerns in context. This greatly improves communication and has the potential to dramatically shorten change evaluation cycle times, speeding up the product design process.

For example, if the electrical designer proposes a component move so that it interferes with a hole or mounting bracket, then the mechanical designer can unambiguously see the change in his 3D environment as well as within the 2D ECAD view and react to it, either by moving the interfered-with mechanical component or by requesting that the electrical designer move the electrical component so that it no longer causes an interference. In this case, the electrical designer can view the 3D mechanical design to help understand the mechanical designer's concerns in context. This greatly improves communication and has the potential to dramatically shorten change evaluation cycle times, speeding up the product design process.

PTC provides ECAD and MCAD users with a suite of tools that enable ECAD-MCAD collaboration without the need for a tight integration between the ECAD and MCAD tools. ProductView ECAD Compare/Validate leverages the EDMD schema. It searches for differences between two design iterations of ECAD and MCAD data to find differences that identify synchronization problems between the design domains. It generates a report that can be interactively reviewed by each. On the ECAD side, ProductView ECAD Compare allows the electrical designer to identify proposed changes that can then be seen and reviewed by the mechanical designer and imported as IDX data. InterComm Expert provides a neutral view of the ECAD design in the context of the MCAD design in which MCAD as well as ECAD changes can be examined in detail. MCAD changes are not imported directly into the ECAD tool but can be visualized using InterComm Expert. These tools can communicate design changes between the MCAD and ECAD domains by email or through the PTC Windchill enterprise-wide PLM solution. A benefit of using Windchill is that it helps manage the change process and the change data as well as the reasons that decisions were made, increasing knowledge retention.

4.2 Tightly-Integrated Collaboration

To facilitate much closer collaboration in which proposed changes are shared dynamically between electrical and mechanical designers, PTC and Mentor Graphics have cooperatively developed a much tighter version of an ECAD-MCAD collaboration solution that allows Expedition and Board Station XE users to directly see and exchange component and feature positioning data back and forth with Pro/ENGINEER users, each working within their own CAD environment.

Figure 2 shows integration of the three main components of the PTC solution: Pro/ENGINEER for MCAD data authoring, InterComm Expert for viewing the ECAD data, and ProductView Validate for managing changes-all interacting with each other supporting a very interactive two-way collaboration. This tight integration uses the EDMD schema for data exchange.

To support this collaboration scenario, Mentor Graphics Expedition PCB and Board Station XE have their own, integrated collaboration viewer, called ECAD_MCAD Collaborator, which reads and writes IDX files and coordinates issue responses and changes. The ECAD user benefits by not having to rely on PTC's InterComm Expert viewer to see changes made in MCAD. Those changes can be examined directly in the Expedition or Board Station Collaborator viewer (see Figure 3).

The usage scenario is such that the ECAD and MCAD users can share data and changes either by using Windchill to manage the data and process, or they can exchange the data via email. Here is where the EDMD schema's ability to work with incremental data updates is a real advantage. Once each user has loaded a baseline set of EDMD data, their incremental changes can be shared in much smaller files. Therefore, the collaboration is more fluid.

Each of the ECAD and MCAD products has a viewing technology that can be used to see and augment the EDMD (IDX) data authored in the CAD products. When a designer makes a change, that change is reflected in the EDMD schema data set so that the designer in the other discipline can see it in the 3D design context and make appropriate changes in their design. They may also use the EDMD schema to communicate issues they have with the proposed change.

Each of the ECAD and MCAD products has a viewing technology that can be used to see and augment the EDMD (IDX) data authored in the CAD products. When a designer makes a change, that change is reflected in the EDMD schema data set so that the designer in the other discipline can see it in the 3D design context and make appropriate changes in their design. They may also use the EDMD schema to communicate issues they have with the proposed change.

PTC's ProductView Validate tool is used to inspect the EDMD data and produce an interactive report to facilitate a more complete understanding of what has been changed so the potential impacts can be assessed.

The ProductView ECAD Compare tool (Figure 4) is used to compare two different versions of a PC board design. It records differences from a previous version within the EDMD schema so that the mechanical designer can be certain to not miss anything important. Mentor Graphics provides a similar set of viewing and analysis capabilities in its tool.

This more tightly-integrated set of tools provides very fluid change evaluation in companies where the MCAD team uses Pro/ENGINEER and the ECAD team uses Mentor Graphics' Expedition PCB or Board Station XE. However, these tools do not support system simulation that can be used to evaluate how electrical controls interact with the mechanical components as defined in the mechanical CAD environment. Mechanical design engineers also cannot test for electromechanical interactions such as proper cable connections or circuit continuity because netlists and other electrical data are not yet made available.

Mentor Graphics' Expedition PCB, Board Station XE, and PTC's Pro-ENGINEER are the first ECAD and MCAD tools to adopt the EDMD standard and introduce this tight level of collaborative integration. Because EDMD is a published standard, it is expected that additional MCAD and ECAD suppliers will adopt it in the future and implement similar capabilities.

Both sets of tools described above help fill the void that now tends to exist between the electrical and mechanical disciplines for companies that produce electro-mechanical products. These tools can be expected to evolve over time.

Tighter integrations with additional PC board design and MCAD tools will be helpful for companies that use those tools.

5. Summary and Concluding Comments

Electro-mechanical design is a critically important part of the product design process in many companies. Collaboration among electrical and mechanical designers throughout the enterprise is required to improve product designs and to foster additional product innovation. However, the integration of electrical and mechanical design into a collaborative design environment is not a simple task. What PTC and Mentor Graphics have done in this area is very positive and sets out a direction for continued development. Furthermore, the current solution can provide real benefits today.

Benefits that accrue from ECAD-MCAD collaboration include faster engineering change resolution, more functionally valid designs, and increased product design innovation. When ECAD-MCAD collaboration plays a central role in the product development process, a number of positive impacts accrue. These fall into two broad categories: business value enhancements and product development cost savings. The overall opportunity for business value enhancement includes:

• Improving design quality by assuring that conflicts between the electrical and mechanical designs are resolved appropriately.
• Improving product design and development speed through a streamlined, shared design process.
• Promoting innovation and enabling continuous improvement by facilitating collaboration.
• Decreasing time-to-market by resolving critical issues earlier in the development process.
• Increasing the number of new product introductions by enabling faster product development.

It is important to understand that business value enhancements tend to provide much larger-but more difficult to quantify-benefits than these cost savings benefits. This is because they result in overall, albeit typically low percentage, revenue increases. Product development cost savings are much more direct and easily measured. Some typical cost savings are:

• Reducing costs of executing changes by decreasing efforts required to evaluate proposed changes across disciplines and supporting the change management process. Cycle time reductions of 20 percent to 60 percent and engineering change throughput improvements of up to 60 percent have been recorded for electro-mechanical and computer systems manufacturers.
• Reducing costs for evaluating designs by supporting virtual simulation of mechanical and electrical systems.
• Lowering re-work costs by performing electro-mechanical analyses earlier in the lifecycle.
• Improving design cycle times by increasing innovation between electrical and mechanical disciplines. CIMdata has recorded design time reductions of up to 50 percent for electronics manufacturers who use collaborative design processes.
• Reducing BOM maintenance by coordinating design tasks. In consumer products companies, CIMdata has recorded reductions of 50 percent to 75 percent the cost of maintaining and reissuing BOMs for consumer products companies when they employ collaborative design across disciplines.

By broadly adopting ECAD-MCAD collaboration solutions as an enterprise strategy, companies can realize benefits, both financial and in improving product design quality. The supporting technologies and practices should be implemented along with appropriate cultural changes to most effectively take advantage of ECAD-MCAD collaboration within a company's particular business strategies. This will result in yet more value in the future.

By broadly adopting ECAD-MCAD collaboration solutions as an enterprise strategy, companies can realize benefits, both financial and in improving product design quality. The supporting technologies and practices should be implemented along with appropriate cultural changes to most effectively take advantage of ECAD-MCAD collaboration within a company's particular business strategies. This will result in yet more value in the future.

While the current suite of products provides a fundamental base for ECAD-MCAD collaboration, PTC and Mentor Graphics have indicated that they will continue to expand the capabilities. For instance, library synchronization and simulation models are targeted to be addressed in future releases. Also, in CIMdata's opinion, adding more tightly integrated solutions to other ECAD and MCAD tools is critical to broadening the usefulness and benefit of this suite.

About CIMdata

CIMdata, a leading independent worldwide firm, provides strategic consulting to maximize an enterprise's ability to design and deliver innovative products and services through the application of Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solutions. Since its founding more than 25 years ago, CIMdata has delivered world-class knowledge, expertise, and best-practice methods on PLM solutions. These solutions incorporate both business processes and a wide-ranging set of PLM enabling technologies.

CIMdata, a leading independent worldwide firm, provides strategic consulting to maximize an enterprise's ability to design and deliver innovative products and services through the application of Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solutions. Since its founding more than 25 years ago, CIMdata has delivered world-class knowledge, expertise, and best-practice methods on PLM solutions. These solutions incorporate both business processes and a wide-ranging set of PLM enabling technologies.

In addition to consulting, CIMdata conducts research, provides PLM-focused subscription services, and produces several commercial publications. The company also provides industry education through PLM certificate programs, seminars, and conferences worldwide. CIMdata serves clients around the world from offices in North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific.

To learn more about CIMdata's services, visit our website at www.CIMdata.com or contact CIMdata at: 3909 Research Park Drive, Ann Arbor, MI 48108, USA. Tel: +1 (734) 668-9922. Fax: +1 (734) 668-1957; or at Siriusdreef 17-27, 2132 WT Hoofddorp, The Netherlands. Tel: +31 (0)23 568-9385. Fax: +31 (0)23 568-9111.