As design disciplines converge, the ability to display, exchange and work in 3D will become an essential part of the electronic product development process.

In today’s global market, the pressure to create smaller, more intelligent products in less time is forcing design engineers to critically reassess and revise the overall product design process – from concept right through to manufacture.

The need for change is further fueled by the rapid development of electronics technology, which in a series of evolutionary steps has altered the fundamental processes we use to create today’s electronic products. The emerging challenge for product development teams is managing and working with these increasingly interdependent processes while meeting production deadlines.

As electronic products and the processes used to create them evolve, the fundamentally dissimilar worlds of electronic and mechanical design need to work in harmony. To stay competitive in today’s market, designers must adopt systems that unify the design process and allow the smooth flow of design data across the electromechanical divide (Figure 1).

FIGURE 1. Shown as rendered in an advanced board layout system, this assembly includes 3D component models imported from MCAD STEP files. The entire board assembly can be exported to an MCAD application as a 3D STEP file, allowing ECAD-MCAD co-design.

Electronics design, however, is typically viewed as a set of disparate design disciplines; each requiring their own design environments -- hardware design, programmable logic design and software development. This divisive approach hampers efficient collaboration with the wider product development process. Unifying electronic design, however, creates the environment required for true design interaction and collaboration in all stages of electronic design flow. By incorporating the processes needed in a single application, a unified electronic development system shares design data at a native level and manages design information globally. The seamless flow of information between design stages opens the door to flexible, interactive and innovative design practices that support a fluid division between hardware and software.

The efficiencies and high level of design collaboration delivered by a unified electronic product development system extend to all levels of the design flow – from concept though to manufacture. The central control of design information and data allows all those involved in the product development process to work in a connected and collaborative way, all the way through to document handling, parts management and manufacturing.

In the bigger picture, the need for effective design collaboration extends to those outside the immediate sphere of electronic design. An increasingly important part of the evolution in product development is interaction between the electronic and mechanical aspects of a design, where the incessant need for smaller and more functional packaging forces the two to be intimately connected – in both a physical sense and in development.

Board assemblies now typically hold all of the external hardware such as connectors, keypads and displays, while the product case assembly neatly exposes these to the user. Gone are the days when a product case merely housed the electronic assemblies and the separate hardware elements were connected via interwiring. In short, packaging has now moved from being a simple container to a tightly integrated part of the product.

Converging MCAD-ECAD Design

More than ever before, a product’s packaging must take into account the physical aspects of the internal electronics while, in turn, the electronics assembly – in practice the board design – must allow for the physical style and functionality of the package design. This increased interdependency of design processes is in line with the overall trend in electronic product development where previously isolated stages in the design flow must now efficiently interact. From design capture through to manufacturing, maintaining a competitive edge in the market requires tools and processes that support collaboration at all levels of development.

Efficiently bridging the gap between the mechanical and electronic design processes is, therefore, becoming crucial for collaborative and successful product development. However, rather than simply passing raw dimensioning and positional data from the ECAD to MCAD environment, what is needed is a design tool that allows a bi-directional flow of comprehensive 3D data between those domains. In the ECAD world, this means an ability to import and seamlessly integrate 3D component data from an MCAD environment; then pass a full and accurate 3D representation of the board assembly back to the MCAD domain (Figure 2).

FIGURE 2. Effective and collaborative ECAD-MCAD design relies on the smooth, bi-directional flow of design data using a robust system-independent format such as the STEP standard.

This higher-level process also offers the opportunity of passing comprehensive, component-inclusive board data to the mechanical design environment earlier in the product development cycle, allowing ECAD-MCAD co-design. What’s more, the gain in design flow efficiency is further enhanced by the reduced need for a prototype board assembly to be on hand during the MCAD design stage. With comprehensive 3D data exchange, the mechanical designer can have full dimensional information on hand even if the board is still being routed in the ECAD environment.

To harness this potential and prepare your design system for the ongoing convergence in the MCAD and ECAD worlds, the minimum requirement is for an electronics design system that allows 3D models to be imported and attached to components. Such a system should also allow you to view and export an accurate 3D rendition of a complete board design. Ultimately, this free exchange of 3D design data creates the opportunity for a high level of interaction between the mechanical and electrical design environments, promoting the productivity and innovation benefits of MCAD-ECAD design collaboration.

Electromechanical Design Flow

As electronic products shrink in size, production deadlines shorten and the industry moves toward “soft” electronic design solutions, the ability to efficiently share information across all design processes is becoming crucial. A unified product development environment offers this capability at a fundamental level through its ability to complete all stages of electronic design – hardware, programmable hardware and embedded software – within a single environment.

The natural extension of this unified data-sharing concept is to encompass the 3D modeling data that must pass to and from the mechanical design domain. In practice, this means implementing ECAD and MCAD systems that support 3D data exchange at a high level, which draws the environments together to create a holistic design environment and more efficient product development workflow.

This approach is gaining rapid momentum. Take, for example, R&D design-house 3G Engineering, which has embraced ECAD-MCAD integration to simplify the overall design process while reducing the company’s design turnaround times and product development costs. As a specialist in the development of custom-built turnkey electromechanical products for industry, 3G’s in-house electronic and mechanical design processes are highly interdependent and need to be approached as a single, cohesive task.

3G Engineering’s consolidated workflow is based on a unified ECAD system that supports both 3D modeling and the bi-directional exchange of 3D design data.

The ECAD system can bring together the software, hardware and programmable hardware parts of the design process into a single application and has allowed the 3G engineers to draw the company’s MCAD system into the overall product development process. The result is a homogeneous workflow that allows a high level of interaction between the ECAD and MCAD design environments.

The data exchange capability is used to good effect by 3G engineers who first develop and refine a new project’s physical properties in the MCAD environment, then determine the volumetric dimensions of the space available for its electronic subsystems. These preliminary dimensions are transferred to the ECAD environment – generally as a proposed 2D board shape – very early in the design cycle, so the board layout process can proceed in parallel with the MCAD design work.

The board assembly is subsequently developed using components with matching 3D models that are sourced from the parts manufacturers or, if unavailable, created from scratch in an MCAD environment. These custom 3D representations are transferred to an ECAD system as STEP 3D data files, where they can be attached to the matching components in the system’s libraries. 3G Engineering is progressively building the 3D elements within the company’s ECAD libraries but sees this as a future investment that easily justifies the work involved in collecting and creating 3D component models.

Ultimately the fruits of that labor become apparent when a board assembly has all components in place. At this point, the 3G engineers can create and view a meaningful 3D representation of the board assembly in the ECAD system, then transfer that rendered image into MCAD as a STEP 3D data file. The 3D representation is then checked for 3D dimensional accuracy in the MCAD environment where, almost literally, it can be fitted into the product’s enclosure or allocated cavity space. According to 3G, at this point, there is rarely a need for design revisions to correct for physical discrepancies between the electrical and mechanical assemblies because, thanks to the initial flow of accurate 2D/3D data, the engineers are able to simply “get it right the first time.”

By basing its product development process on a unified ECAD solution that smoothly interconnects to the MCAD environment, 3G Engineering is able to tackle product design as a single engineering challenge, rather than as set of disconnected design problems that are resolved in isolation – and finally brought together. The company’s engineers can confidently develop the ECAD and MCAD elements of a design in parallel, ECAD-MCAD amalgamation errors are rare, and the overall product design process is faster and simpler. According to 3G, design processes that formerly took weeks with the disconnected ECAD-MCAD systems used in the past can now be completed in just days – a considerable asset for a company that holds a competitive advantage based on innovation and rapid product development times.

As ECAD and MCAD design disciplines converge, it is becoming increasingly important for all design engineering teams to take into account how that relationship works and its ultimate effect on the overall product development process.

For those accustomed to working in the traditional 2D space of ECAD design capture and board design, it is now important to consider the benefits of embracing the 3D design space and its connection with the entire production chain. The ability to display, exchange and work with 3D rendered objects in your electronic design system is not just a nice add-on feature set and is certainly not a gimmick. As design disciplines converge and collaborate at a higher level, it has become an inherent and essential part of the electronic product development process that will play an increasingly important role into the future. PCD&F

Rob Evans is in technical marketing with Altium Ltd. He can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..