Altium will announce (yet another) PCB tool at Solidworks World Today: PCBWorks

[dhofer]

Altium will be announcing another new design tool called PCBWorks today at the annual SolidWorks world conference in Phoenix AZ. I have not seen an announcement yet on the Altium site but I found this one on the local TV station web site: http://www.wvnstv.com/story/28059555/altium-announces-new-pcb-design-tool-for-integrated-solidworks-collaboration

They have a site setup similar to what they've done with Circuit Studio, et. al. @ http://www.pcbworks.com/

You can read for yourself the marketing hype but this version is tailored to integrate directly with Solidworks (hence the name).

[daedalus]

about time someone stuck an EDA package into solidworks, this is long overdue. Personally if I could have a 3d model of a board in solidworks, with solidworks models of the connectors (so you can use smartmates), generated from the EDA design that would be enough to make building wiring looms as simple as dragging connectors out of the toolbox, sketching the paths with routing, and clicking go.

Being able to mate say standoffs on a plastic part to holes on a pcb, and having that binding 2-way would be awesome. Im sure a lot of people would love to have solidworks sketch solver for drawing footprints. just being able to draw what you see in a pdf, and have the solver fill in the blanks would save a lot of time.

Looks like I will have another beta to try out soon (am playing with CircuitStudio right now)

[DerekG]

(am playing with CircuitStudio right now)

How are you finding it compared with AD?

[T3sl4co1l]

about time someone stuck an EDA package into solidworks, this is long overdue. Personally if I could have a 3d model of a board in solidworks, with solidworks models of the connectors (so you can use smartmates), generated from the EDA design

I've been doing that since I started with AD09???

Perhaps more of a PITA than doing various amounts of it in SW directly (placing 3D models is tedious, if you can find them at all; if you can't, building them from the limited set of primitives is much worse), but the Export As STEP has always given excellent results for me and others on the project.

Tim

[daedalus]

DerekG:
I find altium a bit overkill for my needs as I never use the autorouter, don't do simulation, and don't use its fpga/embedded bits, so there is lots of the software I would never miss. I think circuitstudio might be a good fit for me. It feels very much like altium lite, lots of screens are the same, it has a similar workflow. Routing is less advanced, and the shortcuts need work, but I think its going to do everything I need for my company, and its licencing is a LOT better then altium (about 310gbp/yr subscription). 

EDIT: farnell page was misleading, it appears there is no subscription only option, and you have to buy $3000 standalone licence.

There is a free 14 day trial if you want to check it out http://www.circuitstudio.com/.

Tim: I have done that on several projects too, and it does work well up to a point. The issue is that using the more advanced solidworks features with such a step import requires quite a bit of manual fiddling, whilst if you could pull in solidworks models for a subset of the parts it would be much more powerful.

[DerekG]

DerekG:
I find altium a bit overkill for my needs as I never use the autorouter, don't do simulation, and don't use its fpga/embedded bits, so there is lots of the software I would never miss.

Thanks for sharing your views on this.

[diegoterc3]

I am really excited for this product! STEP is not the future between CAD and ECAD. We need something way beter not only with interactivity but real time actualization and interference detecction. Thermal data from altium would work grat with SolidWorks simulation. Maybe (I know this is a long shot) some electrical capability within solidworks like induced current or airgaps!

These times are exciting!

[Wilksey]

Circuit Maker was OK, for me, the main thing missing is to export the 3D View, unless I am completely missing something?

[jmarkwolf]

I'm a 20-year user of Protel/Altium at work, and am evaluating the new Circuit Studio right now as well for when I retire and start consulting in a couple years.

Although I haven't done an end-to-end design yet, aside from the new interface which is a PITA, it is very much a work-alike.

Many of the screens are the same, and it reads my Altium projects and schematics, although it doesn't read nor write PcbDoc's. Probably just a matter of time before translators are available I reckon. I read somewhere you can do it now if you have Eagle.

I'm surprised at the introductory price ($3000 for the license and 1st year of support). And it will only go up from there as time goes on.

It's my opinion that Altium Designer should sell for that if they got rid of all the fluff that only 5% of the users need.

I might be convinced to plunk my money down if I don't find any nasty surprises, and it looks like they'll keep up on updates and upgrades.

[Bud]

the new interface which is a PITA,

Agree here, UI sucks donkey balls big time. Also no Gerber viewer, a big negative to me.

[ajb]

AD15 was supposed to bring some neat ECAD-MCAD collaboration features via IDX.  I saw a pretty slick demo of producing a board in Altium, pulling it into SolidWorks, and being able to instantly synchronize incremental changes to the PCB bidirectionally.  Unfortunately when I tried it myself, I couldn't get the initial AD->SW transfer to automatically pull in the SolidWorks Assemblies for the components, and trying to figure it out manually was a cumbersome mess.  According to some, this is a result of SW not supporting IDX properly, but all I know is it's not as simple as it looked in the webinar 

If PCBWorks winds up being something that can turn a PCBDoc into a fully fledged SLDASM with minimal effort, with accurate geometry and materials through all of the PCB Components and board stack, then it could be a tremendously valuable tool for mechanical and thermal design.  But it also sort of dashes any hope that that ability will come to AD+SW without coughing up for a PCBWorks license.

[dhofer]

@ ajb

I you're interested in tight SolidWorks integration then I would keep my eye on PCBWorks. It uses native Parasolid files to transfer design data to SolidWorks and then builds sldasm and sldprt files from the parasolid automatically which is what all of these crappy translators should have been doing in the first place.

It uses a collaboration panel (one in PCBWorks -- One in SolidWorks) that allows the user to push the design data back and forth with literally the push of a "commit" button. There are still a few issues with (it's still beta) but the integration so far looks very nice. You can design the board shape in SW, push it over to PCBW. Do component placement, push it back to SW for interference checking, etc.

It does not have "ALL" of the features in AD but more than what are offered in Circuit Studio and unless you are doing a lot of super high speed stuff I think its plenty capable for most "main stream" users.

As far as Altium Designer goes, there are rumors that there will be an extension available to allow the same functionality (at a price of course).

[dhofer]

Found this today http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1326275&page_number=1

[ajb]

at least one other group of developers may rush to such a tool: all those hardware designers and do-it-yourselfers who have gone as far as they can on their designs using the limited capabilities of building block board platforms such as Arduino or Raspberry.

Yeah, I'm sure Altium is going to offer PCBWorks at a DIY price point, and with SolidWorks being so cheap, the entire Arduino crowd is SURE to be all over it 

One thing I'm not really clear on--is PCBWorks meant to be a PCB design suite in its own right, or is it just a bridge between AD and SolidWorks?

[dhofer]

Yep. It's a stand alone PCB Design product but it's tailored to work with SolidWorks. Rumor has it that it will be co-marketed by both Altium and SolidWorks. Sort of analogous to how they rolled Trace-Software's Elecworks into SolidWorks Electrical.

[ajb]

That's the part I don't understand.  Why make a standalone product that duplicates existing functionality?  And what about AD users, are we just left to chug along with the crusty old step format?

If they really want to revolutionize ECAD/MCAD workflow, they should roll support for solidworks models into the Altium library system and improve AD's solid modelling system, and have a SolidWorks plugin that allows seamless transfer of a complete PCB as a proper SolidWorks assembly from AD to SW and back.  Add some change management functionality, and the ability to define constraints interactively between the ECAD and MCAD environments, and you'd finally have real collaboration without forking your user base by duplicating functionality in a completely new tool.  That's what the IDX stuff they were crowing about a while ago was supposed to do.  For bonus points, link thermal data through the entire EDA/MCAD stack, so you can specify power dissipation of a component in the schematic (from electrical simulation if you're really keen), send that through to SolidWorks for thermal simulation, provide a thermal map to the PCB designer, and report back component temperatures to the schematic designer.

Honestly, between this, the pricing for CircuitStudio, and a lack of responsiveness to some persistent bugs, I'm beginning to wonder if they're looking at killing off AD.  If PCBWorks is to be the new PCB design suite, it would explain the lack of PcbDoc support in CircuitStudio.

[Rufus]

So did they buy or license this

http://www.desktop-eda.com.au/solidworks-modeler-for-altium-designer/

or copy it?

[dhofer]

@ ajb: I don't pretend to know what their road map does or doesn't include but PCBWorks includes most of what you are describing. You can push EXISTING pcb assemblies built with AD content vault components OR your own components with attached STEP files and PCBWorks will create the native .sldprt and .sldasm files in SolidWorks as a complete SolidWorks assembly for the PCBA. There is change management built in (collaboration panel). The interactive constraints and thermal data is not there yet but it is being considered.

As for AD, the word is that you will be able to add this functionality as an extension in the future (exactly when, I don't know).

@ Rufus: No this is not desktop-eda which Altiuim was re-selling for a while but turned out to be a night-mare with trying to keep in synch with the different versions of SolidWorks and AD, Plus it would not automatically create the native SolidWorks parts for you (the way PCBWorks does). As a result you either had to (re)build the parts on the SolidWorks side, or let desktop-eda just do a simple extrude (using the component outline) for the part. It's my understanding that it now will build the native SW parts but I have not tried / seen that functionality yet.

[ajb]

Ran across an interesting post on the Altium forum:  https://forum.live.altium.com/posts/210440/1

Apparently there's a forthcoming plugin for Altium that will allow parasolid export, and a companion plugin for SolidWorks that completes the collaborative bridge between AD and SW.  However I haven't seen any official announcement yet, or, of course any indication of what the plugins will cost.

So is this PCBWorks, or another attempt at bridging ECAD and MCAD?

[Someone]

So this is the professional step up from CircuitStudio? Which will be co-branded/pushed by Solidworks? Why do all these new products need separate websites without any easy way to compare feature sets?