Recent design tool announcements from Altium and Zuken are attempting to tackle that grey area which is the boundary between PCB electrical and 3D mechanical design.

Typically, engineers completed initial board layout for checking later by CAD engineers, which could, and very often did, lead to layout reworking. Now Zuken has partnered with Dassault Systèmes of France to create a tool for concurrent mechanical and PCB design.

While Altium has added to its 3D PCB visualisation technology a capability which links to external STEP models from within Altium Designer to bring, for example, the model of the mechanical enclosure into the PCB design environment.

"Until now, bringing the electronics and case design together successfully has been pretty much down to guesswork and luck. That’s not a sustainable situation as we move into a new generation of electronic product development," says Nick Martin, CEO of Altium.

According to Martin, being able to manipulate the enclosure and make design decisions in real time, during the electronics design process, is a crucial step forward in unifying broader product design processes with electronics design.

"Simply incrementally improving on design processes that have gone before is not enough. We really do need to change how design is done at a fundamental level," adds Martin.

Zuken’s integrated tool is called Board Interchanger and essentially it gives CAD engineers a board design data interface within Dassault Systèmes’ CATIA V5 software tools for mechanical design by linking to Zuken’s CR-5000 Board Designer tool.

According to the companies, CAD engineers can get involved in the board layout process throughout the layout phase using 3D assembly models of boards generated with CATIA V5 (including the board outline, height-limited area and components etc), which are transferred into the CR-5000 Board Designer database as a mechanical constraint.

"By allowing layout engineers to use pre-defined 3D positioning that is established as ‘stable’ from stage-one layout engineers can work with MCAD approved positioning for placement, wiring and via keep-out areas, while working with within the restrictions of height-limited areas," said the companies.

Interest in this integrated tool is likely to come from designers of mechanically complex PCBs as well as 3D electronic devices, such as molded interconnects.