SolidWorks and electronics packaging

[bckemp]

How is SolidWorks when working on electronics packaging?

Issues specifically are,
- Wiring harness creation.
- Wiring documentation.
- Drawing creation issues.
- PCB import.

Geometry is not exotic but assembly modeling can be messy if forced to go full 3D.

 

[ctopher]

I create them all the time using SolidWorks 2003.
Wiring is sometimes a bit cumbersome, but not bad once use to it. Dwgs are easy. Wiring doc I create wire charts in Excel and place on dwg face. PCB import I get a DXF file exported from OrCad, create the board in SW and copy/paste the DXF PCB routing onto the part...then extrude about .001. Then place parts.

 

[macPT]

ctopher

I am curious about the use of SW for this job, as it is a "dark frontier" between the mechanical design and electrical design. This leads to some diculties in the integration of the electrical parts in the machanical design.

When you refer to wiring in SW2003, do you mean the 2D schematic or 3D representation of wires (do you use any Add-in?)?

Does the Excel chart have any link with SW that can update the chart if you change wire reference in SW (the wiring is created in an electrical CAD?-how to link?)?

Do you place elctronic parts on top of PCB (I gess you have created a library of electronic parts)?

I used to think that this part of the design is very time consuming and no profitable. But it bothers me not having the design all fully documented, leaving some blanks in the electric/electronic integration.

Regards

 

[deadeye]

As far as electrical component models, we use CircuitWorks to take a Mentor Graphics board layout data and drive it into SW. Pretty slick. You get the PCB, holes, and parts, but no traces. Downside is that the TOP of the pcb gets driven to the FRONT plane in SW. Part models are only as accurate as how well you've modeled them in the library. We modeled bodies with footprints.

Cheers!
Deadeye

 

[Wolfchild]

For PCB creation I have been writing VB macro code to import bare board and component placement information from Cadence Allegro layouts. Making the board model itself with drill holes is pretty straight forward. Placing component models is somewhat less straight forward but not too bad as long as you have the models locally. We use PDMWorks here but I cannot find any documentation about how to get into PDMWorks via the API, so I have given up on having my script find component models that way. Although it can take up to an hour to fully populate a PCB assembly with 500~600 components the results I am getting are pretty accurate.

Currently I am struggling with recreating PCB silkscreen text on the PCB model. I want to make sure the mechanical designers know where various silkscreen legends are on the PCB so that they can be visible through cut-outs in the sheetmetal. When you enter sketch text by hand you can attach it to a sketch profile to put the text in any orientation you want. The API doesn't seem to allow access to this functionality. I can add the sketch text from my script but I cannot rotate it.

Other than that I find importing Allegro PCB designs into SolidWorks to be a fruitful endeavor.

Wolfchild

 

[ctopher]

No add-ins for me. I create a sketch for beginning of wire/cale, then a 3Dsketch of wire/cable routing, then create a sweep of the two sketches. The Excel spreadsheet is not linked to the wire/cable model. Just a table for wiring. Takes time to get use to it, but works pretty well. Yes, we have a small library of elect parts that I created or downloaded from several web sited. I have heard CircuitWorks works good, but have not seen it.