Altium Introduces Virtual Collaboration Tool for Electrical and Mechanical Engineers to Optimize Workflow

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Altium has introduced Altium 365’s MCAD CoDesigner, a tool that facilitates seamless collaboration between electrical and mechanical engineers during the design of electromechanical products. It allows for data exchange and synchronization between the Altium Designer ECAD (Electronic CAD) software and various MCAD (Mechanical CAD) software, enabling both teams to work on the same design data without the need for manual file conversions or data sharing. ECAD-MCAD integration accelerates multi-disciplinary electronic product design with seamless collaboration between mechanical and electrical engineers.

Advantages of MCAD CoDesigner:

• Accurate ECAD and MCAD Design Data: Reduce misalignments and errors between electrical and mechanical designs. MCAD CoDesigner preserves the accuracy of native data transferred between domains, ensuring that designs comply with form-factor constraints and electronics design requirements.
• Elevated ECAD-MCAD Collaboration: Design better products and increase innovation by enabling bi-directional design data sharing and communications between electrical and mechanical teams. ECAD and MCAD designers work with their own preferred tools, while MCAD CoDesigner seamlessly shares data and designs across environments.
• Time Efficiency: Reduce design delays and bottlenecks when exporting, sharing, and importing CAD files between teams. Seamless ECAD-MCAD collaboration cuts development time, minimizes design respins, and accelerates time to market.

Key Capabilities of MCAD CoDesigner:

Advanced Copper Geometry in MCAD: Give your mechanical designer all the data they need to perform detailed mechanical checks or FEA with advanced geometry support for extruded copper and via transfers.

ECAD-MCAD Rigid-Flex Synchronization: Design your electronics to meet the needs of today’s portable and flexible devices with rigid-flex support. Electronic designers can define rigid and flexible regions before pushing their design to mechanical engineers for geometry modification and placement in the device assembly.

ECAD-MCAD Native Component Linkage: While Parasolid models might work well for some situations, native component models provide additional benefits. They allow engineers working in each domain (electrical and mechanical) to leverage the full capabilities of their specific software, ensuring accurate representation, data retention, and proper output generation during fabrication and BOM creation.

ECAD-MCAD Synchronization on Harness: Provide the mechanical engineer with electrical connectivity information, including wire properties and connector details, and obtain the physical lengths of wires and bundles. This information is needed to release manufacturing documentation in ECAD.

MCAD-ECAD Synchronization on Multiboard: Provide the electrical engineer with a full or partial product assembly model created in MCAD, enabling them to perform electromechanical checks in ECAD.

Supported MCAD Software:

• SOLIDWORKS®
• PTC Creo® Parametric™
• Autodesk Inventor®
• Autodesk Fusion 360®
• Siemens NX

Click here to download the latest version of the Altium 365 app for your MCAD tool.

Mechanical engineers can download the Altium 365 app for the specific MCAD tool they use to exchange CAD data with an electrical engineer who uses Altium Designer. They can also download a Virtual Workflow plugin for their specific MCAD tool to integrate the product workflow with a virtual electrical engineer. A built-in panel will be displayed in both Altium Designer and MCAD software, streamlining ECAD-MCAD collaboration by allowing engineers to push and pull changes with a mouse click. It also eliminates the need for manual conversion or exchange of files.

Click here to learn more about MCAD CoDesigner.