SAN DIEGO – Altium announced Desktop EDA's Solidworks Modeler and IDF Modelers have been integrated with Altium Designer printed circuit board design software. The move offers designers better ECAD and MCAD integration, Altium said. "By partnering with Desktop EDA, we’re extending Altium’s market-leading position as a native 3D PCB design system provider" said Daniel Fernsebner, director of technical partnerships for Altium. "Desktop EDA apps for Altium Designer focus on bringing greater productivity to mechanical designers working with PCB designs.”

The extension apps for Altium Designer and their companion plug-ins form a bridge between the ECAD and MCAD design worlds. Productivity is increased through the full synchronization capabilities between the target applications. This goes further than eliminating the requirement to recreate MCAD assemblies each time, permitting the modeling of Altium Designer-specific features in the target MCAD system.

By transferring data directly between Altium Designer and SolidWorks programs running on the same PC, designers need not use intermediate files to synchronize design changes and facilitate engineering change orders (ECO). This approach eliminates translation issues, saves time and provides a more detailed model of the PCB design in SolidWorks.

By including PCB copper layers in the transfer, the design in SolidWorks can then be used as a starting point for more advanced mechanical CAD operations, such as thermal simulation, the company said.