It’s hard to imagine that 10 years ago there wasn’t such a thing as an iPhone. In just under a decade, the speed at which technology has transformed mobile phones into sophisticated and futuristic supercomputers has been nothing short of phenomenal.
Take an iPhone 7 apart today and the amount of electronic technology that’s packed into one device is staggering (next generation PCBs, IPCs, LCDs, GPUs, sensors etc.) and trends show consumer electronics are just going to get even more complex.
Every hi-tech market from robotics and machine design to industrial and consumer products is applying new technologies to innovate and create smarter, connected products. But this can only be possible with an increasingly synchronised design environment.
“Historically, product design has always begun with a trade off between mechanical versus electrical,” says NT CADCAM electrical specialist Simon Knibbs. “The ECAD team would want as much space as they can get, while the MCAD team would want to slim down things as much as possible for aesthetic reasons.
“The problem with this approach is that it is only when the electrical and mechanical teams come together at the end and see what they’ve got, that they discover all sorts of engineering errors that could slow the whole design process down. With little time (or budget) to make all the Engineering Change Orders (ECOs) required, often the design can be compromised.”
Now, SOLIDWORKS PCB powered by Altium (formerly PCBWorks), can unite the two worlds of Electrical and Mechanical so you can have both teams working together in perfect harmony. By linking all your CAD mechanical models to electrical CAD data, designs can be managed as a single project with all your data kept in sync.
To find out more about SOLIDWORKS PCB, contact SOLIDWORKS reseller NT CADCAM on 0808 250 6377.
