ECAD/MCAD Collaboration Implementor Forum

Task and Objective

Current electro-mechanical designs pose a number of challenges that can significantly increase design effort and time to market. Typically, these challenges are divided into two groups (1) collision and connectivity design challenges and (2) synchronization issues. Component and mechanical clearances must be taken into account in both the electrical and mechanical designs to ensure that no physical violations occur when the PCB is placed within the enclosure and/or entire system. Tight synchronization between the electrical and mechanical flows is required to ensure that both designs are correctly aligned for manufacture.

The introduction of the prostep ivip Incremental Data Exchange (IDX) communication protocol developed by the ECAD/MCAD IF project group means that designers are now able to fully synchronize their data between both ECAD and MCAD and collaborate between domains more effectively on critical design items, thus ensuring that the design intent is interpreted correctly. This make it possible for designers to collaborate and identify issues much more easily throughout the design process, which in turns enables more robust designs that can be brought to market faster.

 

Focus and concrete results

Organizational and technical challenges

In 2023, the project group worked intensively on the new major version IDXv6.0. Additional use cases were addressed within the V6.0 schema with no major need to create a new version. The implementation guideline was updated to support the new use cases addressed in the previous year. The project group performed the work on IDXv6.0 in monthly online sessions, during which participants presented their suggestions for implementation. The regular meetings involving all the participants led to constructive discussions, which allowed steady progress to be made and a large number of use cases to be implemented. IDX benchmarks were carried by the major vendors to ensure compliance to the standard. The committee updated ecad-mcad.org with the latest results provided by the ECAD and MCAD vendors.

Planning for the current year 2024

For 2024, the ECAD MCAD Collaboration IF group will continue to add additional schema changes to support advanced design collaboration and improve the implementation guidelines when implementing the IDX standard. Below is a table of the initial plan of schema and documentation changes for 2024: