Open AccessThe main goal of this white paper is to investigate the methods to accelerate the end-to-end simultaneous development of electronic PC assemblies in MCAD/ECAD systems. With raising the produced electronic equipment rates and quantities, there is a need to speed up the yield of new products. The article offers an alternate approach to the end-to-end simultaneous development in Altium Designer / Solid Works CAD/CAE systems, which enables a radically shortened time to design new devices and databases of components.
The first part of the paper analyses the methods and models to solve the tasks of the endto-end simultaneous development of PC assemblies using the Circuit Works module for Solid Works. It examines the problems of traditional data exchange methods between Altium Designer and Solid Works arising from the limitations of the IDF 2.0 format used, as well as from the problems of 3D-models of components and because it is necessary to support two different databases.
The second part gives guidelines and an example of the end-to-end simultaneous PC assembly development using the Altium Modeler module for Solid Works aimed at Altium Designer and presents a brief review of algorithms. The proposed method neither requires an additional database, nor uses an intermediate format such as IDF. The module translates the PCB model directly to Solid Works to generate the assembly model. The Altium Modeler is also capable to update its created assembly in Solid Works, which is very useful in case of modification of components and PCB itself. This approach is better tailored to the end-to-end development in terms of acceleration, enhancing facility of simultaneous work in different MCAD/ECAD systems, and eliminating errors arising from the need to support two CAD databases of the same functionality.
In the conclusion the paper gives suggestions for using the modules for simultaneous development of electronic PC assemblies in Altium Designer and Solid Works.