PLM for Mechatronic Products

PLM for Mechatronic Products

The success of PLM adoption in conventional mechanical product manufacturing industries gave inspiration to the PLM product vendors to focus on the combined electrical, electronics, mechanical and software product development, also known as, Mechatronics, which is a bigger challenge in the integrated product development scenario.

Typical mechatronic product development involves managing both hardware and software at various phases such as chip design with hardware specific language, Printed Circuit Board (PCB) layout design, mechanical and electrical design and software development. Usually this involves multiple environments which require synchronization at predetermined stages.

Major challenge is to integrate the life cycles of these different domains. Since these life cycle behavior are independent today including the systems which handle and support the life cycle management, it becomes a challenge to obtain an integrated product view and to manage the dynamics of changes across these domains. While there are changes to the design both at hardware and software level, lack of integrated PLM causes delay and also increases cost of the final product design.

Following are some of the other challenges:

o Keeping in sync with the different ECAD and MCAD systems.
o Maintaining short product cycles.
o Managing more variants.
o Utilizing manual prototyping methods which are expensive.
o Configuration management of mechanical, electrical and software product data.
o Managing rich electronic and software contents.

In addition, with the advent of globalization, managing the security and the Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) from Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) to suppliers, has added to the challenges faced by these industries.

Latest PLM solutions have to address these challenges effectively by giving an integrated secure environment for various work groups such as Electrical / Electronics, Mechanical and Software to simultaneously work on the product. Effective ECAD and MCAD integrations enable reduced use of transfer protocols which avoids the problem of stripping the essential design information during translation, Integrated prototyping in place of existing isolated prototype methods, Flexible work flow model to route the various activities and Effective supplier integration process which empowers the OEM to assign and review the supplier deliverables are the key benefits obtained.

This paper discusses these aspects in detail and suggests a suitable PLM environment to overcome the challenges in this growing field.

Background

The development of mechatronic products in the past, has been done in separate silos of electrical/electronics, mechanical, and software domain experts. In many cases, mechanical engineering work is completed and then the task is forwarded to the electronic/electrical design engineering group, and then forwarded to the software engineering group. Also the mechanical, electrical, and software features of the product were integrated through rounds of prototyping as shown in Figure 1. Since the disciplines worked in silos with their own individual design processes and non-integrated information system tools, engineers downstream in the development had little opportunity to provide valuable inputs early in the cycle. Hence design deficiencies were often discovered late in the process which resulted in increased cost and time for effecting design changes.

For example, PCBs used currently requires a much tighter integration between PCB design and mechanical engineering. Every PCB contains mechanical constraints primarily due to product packaging requirements that constrain the shape, size and position of PCBs. Based on these packaging constraints, the mechanical designer determines the board outline, size and the locations of mounting holes for the board. The mechanical designer also knows where to place certain critical components, such as connectors, displays, and switches, because these locations are determined by the product packaging itself. Often, the mechanical designer indicates areas on the board where components cannot be placed, or where placement is limited by other obstructions in the overall assembly.

On the other hand, the PCB layout designer uses initial information from MCAD as the basis for creating the board layout in ECAD. Often the layout designer adds additional placement and routing restriction areas, tooling holes, pads, and solders masks. With the pre-placed components as a start, the layout designer places additional components. The locations of the pre-placed components may have to be modified to accommodate board routing considerations. Typically, several revisions between MCAD and ECAD are required to stabilize the design, or to accommodate product packaging or functional changes. Due to the limited visibility to product information, respective disciplines will consider it as a fault with other disciplines.

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