Collaborative design environment between ECAD and MCAD engineers in high-tech products development

Abstract

In order to make more competitive electronic products, major electronics companies struggle to design products with a thin shape and complex convergence functionalities without any lead-time and cost increase. Also, the development mission of a project is changed continuously to catch up with the competitor’s products in a short time and the importance of aesthetic design is getting bigger and bigger in these days. In many cases, shape changes bring the electrical layout changes of a notebook computer main board and vise versa. Those development environmental changes make the engineers harder and harder and require more collaboration between electrical and mechanical engineers to reduce development time and design errors occur from early design stage. In this paper, a collaborative design environment consists of a web-based project management system and automated printed circuit board (PCB) generation and validation system is proposed. The web system is used for project management and design data exchange including electrical CAD (ECAD) data and related technical documents between ECAD and mechanical CAD (MCAD) engineers. By using this project management web portal, engineers can share the design information with design change history. ECAD data in Intermediate Data Format can be automatically validated in 2D domain while sending the ECAD data via web system. To generate a full 3D quality product model with PBA in MCAD side, an automated 3D PCB generation and assembly clearance checking module is developed.