Desktop Engineering - Mentor Graphics & PTC Collaborate on ECAD

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Mentor Graphics & PTC Collaborate on ECAD–MCAD

Plan is to deliver “industry’s first” bidirectional ECAD–MCAD collaboration capability.

by DE Editors | Published September 29, 2008

Mentor Graphics Corporation (Wilsonville, OR) announced delivery of the industry’s first design collaboration capability between electrical (ECAD) and mechanical (MCAD) design solutions — enabling teams to use this solution from design inception to the manufacturing process.

Based on the ProSTEP iViP Association-approved electromechanical interchange standard whose development was initiated and driven by Mentor, Mentor Graphics’ ECAD-MCAD Collaborator product enables bidirectional, digital communication of incremental design changes and automates the review and approval processes between the respective domains.

To design consumer electronics products successfully, electronics and high-tech companies need to break down the organizational and technical barriers that have traditionally limited design collaboration across disciplines.

PTC says it is the first supplier of mechanical design solutions to adopt this standard and implement complementary collaboration capability. Together, PTC and Mentor offer what they say is the industry’s first complete end-to-end collaboration solution between MCAD and ECAD designers. These capabilities will improve design process efficiency and cycle times by using standards-based processes and easy-to-use graphical visualization in both the mechanical and electrical design domains.

Design collaboration between Expedition Enterprise and Board Station XE PCB design flows through Mentor’s ECAD-MCAD Collaborator product, and PTC’s Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 4.0 ECAD-MCAD Collaboration Extension is available.

For details, contact Mentor Graphics Corporation.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.