What you’ll learn:
- How to reduce errors and unify MCAD and ECAD teams working together on the same design.
- How to design with high precision and enable MCAD and ECAD teams to work in their respective design environments.
- How to help mechanical engineers perform detailed mechanical checks, finite element analysis, and modify placement to ensure mechanical constraints are satisfied.
For many electronic products, flex and rigid-flex board designs require careful modeling of the mechanical behavior of the flex region to ensure form-factor constraints are satisfied and the flex regions are reliable. Faster product release cycles compound these problems, thus requiring electrical and mechanical engineers to work together more than ever.
Success in these areas requires close collaboration between MCAD and ECAD domains to ensure mechanical constraints aren’t violated and the finalized design can be produced at scale. Because today’s design and data-management systems continue to lack basic integration features, collaboration between these domains still relies on file exchange between each side.
To help design teams overcome these productivity challenges, Altium developed the MCAD CoDesigner extension. This simple utility connects Altium Designer projects to popular MCAD applications via the Altium 365 platform. By unifying the traditional MCAD/ECAD workflow, multifunctional design teams can eliminate many of the manual file-exchange processes normally required as part of enclosure design, defining constraints, and interference back-checking.
Empowering More Efficient Workflows
One example of a unified MCAD/ECAD environment is Altium Designer with its CoDesigner panel. A matching add-on panel in MCAD software allows electrical and mechanical designers to interact seamlessly, enabling an efficient collaborative workflow.
Behind the scenes, this workflow is facilitated by server-side support, allowing design changes to be transferred, reviewed, and accepted or rejected without the need for manual file transfers in lossy file formats. The CoDesigner extension provides best-in-class model support by preserving references to board features, ensuring mechanical updates in one application are accurately reflected in the corresponding application.
After the initial component placement is completed by the PCB layout engineer, it becomes the mechanical engineer’s job to check that everything fits the enclosure and communicates required changes as necessary. In many cases, mechanical designers need to perform detailed mechanical checks, finite element analysis (FEA), and modify placement to ensure mechanical constraints are satisfied. The CoDesigner extension enables these tasks and many more for PCB assemblies with synchronization and modeling features (see video below).
Watch this hands-on demonstration by Quantel engineers using Altium Designer for ECAD and Solidworks for MCAD to optimize and streamline the way their mechanical and electrical design teams work together while staying in their own familiar design environments.
Design Data Synchronization
The MCAD CoDesigner capability implements a simple Push-Pull process, where updates are exchanged between each side with a button in the CoDesigner panel. Updates on one side can be transferred to a colleague in seconds, and this triggers a notification in the collaborator’s CoDesigner panel. Each side can keep track of changes by adding comments to each Push operation.
This instant exchange of critical ECAD and MCAD data is accomplished without the need for manual IDF/IDX/STEP/DXF file imports and exports. Engineers in both domains can focus on design instead of creating and transferring files.
When the design is imported into an MCAD application, any changes made in the MCAD tool are synchronized back to the ECAD side with the Push-Pull functionality. Once the design is pulled back into Altium Designer, the PCB layout data will immediately update to reflect changes in the board outline, copper, hole placement, or component locations.
Similarly, subsequent changes in Altium Designer can be pushed back into the MCAD side, causing the board model to update once the design is pulled back into the MCAD application. This back-and-forth synchronization also is applied to the enclosure, which can be pushed into Altium Designer.
Precise Model Representation
Once a PCB assembly is imported into an MCAD application, the mechanical engineer needs to have precise board geometry, and, in many cases, a precise definition of copper and solder mask. That precise model can be used to perform detailed mechanical checks and for FEA like thermal analysis.
Synchronized MCAD and ECAD Environments
The CoDesigner extension synchronizes many of the important aspects of an ECAD environment in an MCAD application, and vice versa:
- The mechanical designer can work with a model of the PCBA directly in an MCAD application.
- The mechanical designer can select and share elements of an enclosure back to the ECAD application, allowing the EE to see a model of the housing and any relevant constraints.
- Because the MCAD CoDesigner works with native MCAD data directly (and carefully), any mechanical constraints and dimensions defined among elements on the bare board, PCB components, or enclosure are preserved during each sync. In addition, since ECAD allows to lock components on the PCB, CoDesigner synchronizes ECAD’s “locked” state with MCAD’s “constrained” state.
- A standard method for enforcing mechanical constraints in an electrical design is to define a keepout region in the MCAD model. Because model references are preserved on each side, keepouts can be defined in the MCAD tool and synchronized back to the ECAD side.
Synchronized Constraints
Altium Designer’s native 3D design tools provide constraint and clearance checking in 3D. The same types of clearance definitions and constraints can be pushed into an MCAD application for use in mechanical design tasks. Similarly, it’s possible to define these constraints and clearances in the MCAD application, and be pushed back into Altium Designer. This level of synchronization helps expedite interference checking on both sides and allows for interferences to be caught early.
MCAD and ECAD Component Linkage
The CoDesigner extension automatically synchronizes components placed in the MCAD tool with corresponding components in the ECAD tool, and vice versa. This saves design collaboration time because the mechanical designer can immediately determine the appropriate location for mechanically constrained components, such as connectors and mounting holes. Placement in the MCAD application helps ensure enclosure constraints are satisfied—the mechanical designer will have full visibility of enclosure constraints, and the component definitions in the ECAD side are synchronized automatically.
Keepouts can be defined as top or bottom layers in the MCAD tool. These keepout assignments will be reflected in the PCB layout and checked for interference against the design rules in the ECAD side. If required, the keepout shape can be adjusted in Altium Designer and pushed back to the MCAD side.
Bidirectional Support for Rigid-Flex Boards
Flex and rigid-flex assemblies require additional modeling and evaluation beyond what’s applied in rigid PCB assemblies. The MCAD CoDesigner extension provides support for flex and rigid-flex boards in both directions.
Rigid and flex regions, bending lines, and board shapes can be defined in the MCAD application and pushed back into Altium Designer. Once the layout engineer places components and completes initial routing, the design can be evaluated and previewed in the MCAD side alongside an enclosure. Bidirectional support for rigid-flex designs is seamless and follows the same workflow used for rigid PCBs.