All of a sudden there is a flurry of announcements by EDA vendors claiming to supply ECAD–MCAD collaboration tools. But the electrical and mechanical domains have had interface capabilities for years, so why all the attention now? I believe that several things have happened over the past year to bring this to light.
First and foremost is the realization by EDA vendors that the business pressures on our customers are only increasing. They have stated that they must cut time-to-market (product design time) by up to 50%. They need to cut development cost by 30%. And they need to continue to deliver the most competitive products that use the most advanced technology with time for their designers to innovate. EDA vendors are realizing that they can NOT meet these demands solely with incremental improvements to their PCB systems design solutions. They must create efficient collaboration capabilities between ECAD and the other multiple disciplines in the product development process. MCAD is one of those.
Another reason is that now a standard exists that can support true ECAD-MCAD collaboration. In 2005, Mentor started an effort with some MCAD vendors, a few select customers, and the ProSTEP organization to develop a standard for collaborative exchange of incremental changes to the PCB or enclosure. The EDMD schema became an approved standard this spring. This does not replace the IDF standard for en masse data base transfer but compliments it by supporting incremental change capability. Mentor and PTC have used EDMD to implement the first collaboration capability enabling proposal, rejection, counter proposal, and acceptance scenarios between ECAD and MCAD designers. Hopefully all ECAD and MCAD vendors will implement collaboration capabilities using this standard. This does not replace the need for en masse data transfer, or 3D viewing (which almost all EDA vendors have), or communication between the disciplines, but embellishes it with true digital design-in-progress collaboration.
So, need drives innovation. Innovation leads to quantum improvements to the electronic product design tools and processes. And these improvements lead to meeting the business needs of the electronics industry. One old blogger’s opinion. How about yours?
John,
I couldn’t agree more about the value to an organization of timely, iterative, bi-directional collaboration between the ECAD and MCAD communities. The Web-waves are overflowing with articles about business issues regarding product cost, time to market, and productivity, and how those can be positively influenced by an increased communications during the design process. I’ve been involved in the electronics industry for over 25 years, most of the early years spent in PCB assembly/test and final product assembly. I have seen first hand the huge costs incurred at the end of a design cycle by the lack of continuous communication between organizations. Costs such as rework and material scrap are very real, and slipped product introduction schedules can be very expensive in the increasingly competitive industry. The “throw it over the wall” syndrome has existed partly for political reasons, but also because until now there wasn’t really a viable solution to the problem.
This is not to say that there is no value to 3D Visualization, often touted today by ECAD and MCAD vendors as “collaboration”. There is considerable value in the ECAD designer being able to better visualize the mechanical constraints he is working with early in the project, but that tends to be a one-way street, with little or no back-flow of information or data.
As the lines between the electrical and mechanical design worlds blur, the ultimate solution, as you describe, is the bi-directional sharing of mutual design data when it is needed, long before conflicts become ugly surprises at the end of the cycle.
-Larry Kenyon
Mentor Graphics