They can eliminate the trial-and-error “wait-and-see” ECAD-MCAD iterations that have delayed bringing a product to market.
Electronics designers continue to seek new ways to innovate, to create the next generation of electronic products. Altium believes that a unified approach to electronics design, which now links to the MCAD world, must replace the current silo approach of loosely-connected design tools that go to making an electronic product and bringing it to market.
Being able to manipulate the enclosure and make design decisions in real time, during the electronics design process, is a crucial step forward in unifying broader product design processes with electronics design. It’s now easy for electronics designers to collaborate directly with their mechanical design peers.
It’s now possible to link to external STEP models from within Altium Designer to bring, for example, the model of the casing into the PCB design environment. By using the non-proprietary STEP 3D file format as a mechanism, Altium allows ECAD-MCAD collaboration without forcing organisations to purchase costly integration add-ons or use a specific mechanical CAD package.
It lets designers create the board shape directly from the case model, do full mechanical fit and clearance checking, and update their board design or component choice and placement to ensure a perfect fit and conformance to physical design constraints. If the mechanical designer changes the case design, this is updated within Altium Designer. The complete board design can also be output by Altium Designer as a STEP model for use by the mechanical designer.
“Simply incrementally improving on design processes that have gone before is not enough. We really do need to change how design is done at a fundamental level. The new ECAD-MCAD collaboration capabilities of Altium Designer demonstrate what’s possible when you think beyond traditional design silos and take a unified approach to product development,” said Nick Martin, chief executive officer of Altium.