Application of SolidWorks in the Design of Automotive Electronic Products

Trends in Automotive Electronics Design

To reduce time to market and stay ahead of the competition, electronic product designers need to respond to the rapidly changing demands of the electronics industry.

The continuous development of electronic and semiconductor technologies has led to rapid changes in electronics, mechatronics (the collaboration of electromechanics, electronics and software), and the tools for designing component systems.

Products need to have more functions, but the product size cannot be larger than previous products and competitors' products, or even smaller. Competition drives the electronics industry to develop smaller but more functional devices. This requires product design tools that can "use physical space more economically".

More features usually mean more complex electronics and components that need to dissipate heat. Due to market demands, even when new features are added to new models, the size of the product housing cannot be increased, but needs to remain the same or even become smaller. In addition, greater packaging density requires an increased level of detail at the component level in order to optimize proper flow analysis.

Some new global environmental standards have emerged, such as Roll S (Restriction of the Use of Hazardous Substances), which restricts the use of lead and other environmentally harmful substances and requires that all products sold and handled in the EU market must comply with the regulations from July 1, 2006.

As microcontroller systems continue to miniaturize, more traditional hardware components (such as switches and displays) are being replaced by software functions. For example, a product that required a set of 1 or 2 buttons a few years ago can now be operated with two buttons and an LCD display.

Challenges in the automotive electronics industry

Due to technological advances in the electronics industry, ECAD systems are becoming more and more complex. They are increasingly becoming expert systems that require a high level of expertise to use them to design.

Because mechanical engineers and electronic designers use different systems, there is a lack of interoperability between these systems, resulting in duplication of effort and an excessive amount of time spent converting data between them.

The lack of interoperability between electrical and mechanical engineering CAD systems results in inefficient products because electrical and mechanical designers will add “duplicate elements” to the product to compensate for the lack of accurate information between the two systems.

In order to sell products in a global economy, international standards are expanding beyond DIN, ANSI and ISO to include RoHS (Restriction of Hazardous Substances). In order to deliver products to the market in a timely manner, it is necessary to know early in the process that electronic components and materials comply with these standards, as this involves cost and procurement issues.

Many electronic components have not yet formed a unified industry standard. Now, more and more 3D models are being created, but, along with geometric data, there is no standard to specify how to transmit the non-geometric characteristics embedded with the components (such as materials, standards followed, sources, etc.).

Automotive Electronics Design Process

Product development cycles are becoming shorter so that at each stage of the design cycle, the challenges and deliverables you face are different. You need to accomplish more in less time. Let's look at the basic electronic product development process.

Component Specifications - The first step is to come up with a new product concept. This can be an improvement on a currently offered product or a completely new and original concept (breakthrough technology). Component specifications can be determined at the start of a project, but more often they are done as the concept is generated. Component specifications are an initial attempt to define a product concept with the goal of efficiently moving from concept to actual manufactured product.

Package Design - This next phase is considered by many to be the core of the product design process, conceptual design. This phase of the product design process can be expanded to include its own process, but for electronic product design, the industrial designer and mechanical engineer determine a suitable concept (one that meets the requirements specified in the product brief and also fits within the required square inch area - data initially provided by the electrical engineer), who then take cues about the size and shape of the board.

PCB Design - If package design is at the heart of the product design process, then PCB design is at the heart of the electronics design process. Once the preliminary PCB layout (along with the locations of major components, connectors, and switches/interfaces) is handed over to electronics engineering, the electronics engineer becomes responsible for the detailed design of the PCB and its interconnections. It is almost inevitable that the PCB designer will make many minor (and sometimes major) changes to the component locations specified by the mechanical engineer. In addition, avoidance zones must be specified and agreed upon between the electronics engineer and the mechanical engineer to avoid encroachment on tracking areas. The preliminary design is then returned to the mechanical engineer via an IDF.

Prototyping - At some point in the product design process, the design must be "realized" in the form of a physical prototype. Prototypes come in all forms, from mechanical enclosures to circuit breadboards to one-off, fully functional "near production" working models. This is an important milestone in the design process, where all disciplines are integrated into a unified solution. Prototypes of mechanical enclosures and PCBs and interfaces serve different important purposes, including fit and trim, thermal analysis, functional analysis (stress, drop testing, etc.) and assembly-oriented manufacturing. Prototypes are also used to verify concepts in key research groups.

Delivery to production – Finally, customer documentation and manuals are produced. This is another time-consuming and tedious process. If design changes occur late in the development cycle, these manuals must also be updated to maintain bill of materials information for spare parts and repair processes.

Of course, this is not a linear process. There are always many design iterations, driven by many factors: changes in customer requirements; internal engineering design changes; and changes requested by manufacturing and suppliers.

CAD/CAE integrated solution

SolidWorks provides solutions that enable interaction with electronic product designs, shorten lead times, and reduce the number of expensive prototypes produced throughout the design process.

Customers expect more features in their products, which forces electronic product designers to include more features in their products, but the size of the product housing is similar or smaller than previous models. This change, coupled with the pressure to bring products to market faster, requires designers and engineers to complete the conception, design, and delivery with greater packaging density in a shorter product development cycle. You need to complete more work in a shorter time, and SolidWorks Office Premium can help you achieve this goal.

Determine Component Specifications You can no longer afford to spend weeks bidding on a project to a client. SolidWorks lets you leverage past projects for bidding by quickly searching previous 2D and 3D designs for relevant benchmarks. By easily finding previous similar projects, you can quickly generate bid drawings and more effectively estimate project costs to ensure revenue. 3D Content Central offers a large number of online components that will help you get started quickly and help you determine more accurate specifications. If you have to search through outdated document catalogs, contact suppliers for the latest versions, and perhaps design the purchased parts to fit the overall design, this will waste some time. SolidWorks offers Toolbox and 3D Content Central, which allow you to find and import standard components (connectors, switches, holders, IC components, etc.) and download them directly into your 3D design. So you can focus on designing instead of recreating OEM parts. You can provide more accurate bids before your competitors; and use eDrawings to provide digital versions of your designs, which can give customers more insight into the design process. In addition, eDrawings provides annotation capabilities. Faster responses and better customer interactions can help differentiate you from your competitors.

Package Design SolidWorks provides you with a fast, flexible and easy-to-use solid modeling system that allows you to easily and quickly prototype electronic designs. SWIFT technology helps you achieve the correct design intent, helping you focus on staying ahead of the competition and ahead of customer needs. Design instead of using an MCAD system. The multi-entity modeling approach allows the conceptual design of different components to be quickly completed at the part stage (without having to go to the assembly stage), thereby speeding up the design process. When you work in the assembly stage, SolidWorks allows the use of interference testing to dynamically position components, making it easy to populate the PCB with major components. PDMWorks tracks version changes throughout the design to ensure that you can track your design solutions. The associativity of solidWorks means that once a change is made to a specific part or assembly, the change is propagated to all appropriate documents and drawings, including drawings of parts and assemblies, NC documents, and customer manuals.

PCB Design Although SolidWorks does not functionally meet the requirements for creating PCB layouts, the industry standard is for MCAD designers to provide preliminary circuit board layouts and provide interoperability between mechanical and electronic engineering disciplines. SolidWorks reads in lDF files. With the addition of CircuitWorks to the SolidWorks product package, we can provide additional interoperability between mainstream ECAD packages and SolidWorks. The strength of SolidWorks' world-class solid model solutions, combined with ECAD systems, ensures that you can design better electronic products faster without worrying about the duplication of work and inefficiencies caused by non-interoperable systems.

PrototypingAfter an initial design is generated, proof of concept can be implemented by building a physical prototype. SolidWorks provides many tools that allow you to create "virtual" prototypes of your designed products, reducing the number of expensive physical prototypes to be built. Advanced collision detection tools, combined with COSMOSWorks and OSMOSFIoWorks for structural strength, vibration, and thermal analysis, help you eliminate guesswork and problems even before you build a physical prototype. When physical prototyping is required, the collaborative combination of part modeling, sheet metal, wiring, and component assembly work together to create a unified, fully defined and fully re-definable model that can be modified repeatedly as many times as needed to solve, adapt, and eliminate assembly problems and thermal issues.

Delivering to ProductionSolidWorks is very good at automatically creating part drawings and cable harness drawings, which can fully document your products. Even if changes occur late in the design cycle, modifications and changes to parts and assemblies will automatically update documents and drawings, and are managed by PDMWorks Enterprise, ensuring that suppliers have the latest information. PDMWorks Enterprise manages all aspects of design, from 3D parts, assemblies and drawings to assembly manuals, maintenance documents and more. SolidWorks is committed to enabling customers to complete their work smoothly and to convert the final design to other industries. This is why SolidWorks provides a large number of conversion formats (ensuring that your SolidWorks design is correctly and accurately converted to other manufacturing systems).

A large amount of user data shows that the use of CAD/CAE integrated automotive electronics design solutions has the following significant effects:

Reduce new user onboarding time by up to 50% - SolidWorks has one of the shortest learning curves in the industry. Mechanical and electronic designers with no previous MCAD experience can easily master the tool in less than a week.

Reduce CAD licensing and maintenance costs - Compared with any other MCAD system on the market, SolidWorks allows customers to spend the least money to get the most value. SolidWorks & COSMOS provide unparalleled functionality for electronic designers.

Reduce design cycles by 40% while enhancing product aesthetics and improving packaging efficiency—Since electronic designs begin as a series of solid models and are maintained throughout the design cycle as an integrated, fully redefinable solid model assembly, dynamic interference and rich measurement tools can be used to understand exact spacing and positions to optimize PCBs, discrete components, and interface components.

Reduce development costs by up to 30% - Because SolidWorks can "virtual prototype" to test interference, thermal and assembly issues, much of the guesswork can be eliminated before the actual physical prototype is built, thereby reducing the number of prototype iterations.

Reduce processing development time by two to three weeks SolidWorks provides manufacturing departments with highly detailed and complete data specifications, as well as innovative and easy-to-produce part and assembly drawings, while also providing eDrawings and the industry's most extensive data conversion capabilities.