機械與電子設計整合之研究與實作-使用中介資料格式IDF 3.0

Abstract

For many enterprises, the electronic and mechanical design is an important step in product design process. The electronic and mechanical design engineers must collaborate with each other for product innovation and product design improvement. However, it is not an easy task to integrate the electronic and mechanical design in a collaborated design environment. As the interference between mechanics and electronic components becomes more important and complicated, this problem can only be solved effectively with close collaboration between product design engineers. But in most companies the electronic design and mechanical design are performed by independent teams from different departments, thus the conventional design solutions from these two fields can not communicate with each other. This is because the tools used by different design engineers cannot share important data during the design process. Since the design solutions of each field are developed by different software suppliers, each with their own data formats and architectures, for collaboration, a common format for data sharing and exchange will be needed. The collaboration between electronic Computer-Aided Design (ECAD) and mechanical Computer-Aided Design (MCAD) depends on the data exchange so that the PCB ECAD data and 3D MCAD model of mechanical components can be inspected together for relevance before and after the complete electronic and mechanical designs. Intermediate Data Format (IDF) is the most widely used format for data exchange to integrate different upstream and downstream systems. IDF is an open standard developed by Mentor Graphics to allow integration between ECAD and MCAD systems. Many ECAD vendors support IDF, including Cadence, Mentor Graphics, Zuken and so on. In this thesis, we design a program using IDF version 3.0 and a customized procedure to solve the inconsistencies between ECAD component database and MCAD component database at data exchange. By converting components for data exchange at design integration, the design schedule can be effectively accelerated and the design errors can be reduced.