In a move that has echoes of the mechanical design world's
Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), Mentor
Graphics announced a significant expansion of its Capital electrical
engineering platform with new products designed to take the coverage downstream
to product definition and upstream through service and support.
Capital, which replaces Mentor's existing CHS brand of
electrical system and wire harness design tools, takes more of a lifecycle
approach to electrical system and wire harness design and is a reflection of
Mentor's second strategic phase of development in this product sector,
according to Martin O'Brien, general manager of the Mentor Integrated Electrical
Systems Division. "The original suite was a set of design tools to create the
electrical system and design of the harnesses," O'Brien explains. The new
Capital suite delivers on all of its traditional capabilities in addition to
new functionality for designing the architecture and aiding service technicians
supporting the finished product in the field. It also encompasses enterprise
data management and compliance functionality, serving as a single repository to
help manage and support the highly specialized materials and workflows
associated with seeing a complex electrical system through each phase of its
lifecycle.
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Mentor's second-phase strategy is in direct response to
surging importance of electrical and electronics components in a range of discrete
products-from cell phones to airplanes. Some 40 percent of the cost of a new
vehicle is directly tied to electronics content and this area has become a key
source of competitive advantage across a wide variety of product categories. As
a result, manufacturers need a richer and more integrated set of tools, O'Brien
says, to manage the complexity around cost, weight, configurations and
compliance, and the new lifecycle approach with Capital is intended to provide
such a solution. While many PLM offerings can manage electrical design data,
the Capital tools are positioned as a highly-specialized domain offering,
specifically optimized for managing the data and workflows around electrical
engineering design.
"This is a complex data flow, and there are long
lifecycles," he explains. "Compared to a IC or PCB component which never gets
fixed, an aircraft can have a lifecycle of up to 50 years and a car up to nine
years. You have to maintain an understanding of what the electrical system
looks like on these products over the course of their lifecycle."
Dick Slansky, senior analyst at
ARC Advisory Group, agrees that with the rise
in complexity of so-called "smart products" packed with electronics and
embedded software content, electrical design needs to be considered as an
integral part of the PLM umbrella. For
the most part, 80 percent of existing eCAD tools are specifically focused on
the design of printed electronic circuit boards and don't take a systems
engineering approach to the entire product. "What companies are trying to do is
get to the early stage integration of all the disciplines together to form a
system engineering or functional specification approach," he explains. Via the
new line of Capital products, Mentor is pushing the full spectrum of electrical
design as part of core lifecycle platform - a bridge manufacturers have been
requesting as they struggle with mechatronics design.
Configuration Complexity
The new Capital suite adds three new tools to expand
coverage across these areas, building on the original platform's focus on the design
domain. Two of the new offerings address the challenge of configuration
complexity management-the explosion of possible configurations of electrical
systems, be they in cars or in aircraft, depending on the model or variant and
driven by more exacting customer demand.
The first tool in this category is Capital Level Manager,
designed to serve as a quantitative link between marketing and engineering to
help deliver numerical feedback on configuration complexity and the resulting
costs. Different vehicle models and optional electronic content create huge
configuration complexity for each platform and as part of the design process,
manufacturers want to narrow the scope of possible choices or combine them in
such a way as they are optimally costed. Capital Level Manager is typically
used at the early stage platform definition phase of a project as the means of
providing qualitative trade-offs between marketing imperatives and engineering
realities. The tool captures the product plan and calculates the configuration
complexity, helping identify candidates to reduce complexity (give away) and
quantifying the cost impact of decisions.
The Capital ModularXC addition comes into play to support
what's known as the alternative modular process, where multiple configurations
are constructed from harness fragments much like letters of an alphabet would
be used to build words. Capital ModularXC defines the wire harness fragments
and manages the relationships between them, at both the design phase (optional
features) and build phase (production sub-assemblies) so it can streamline the
configuration phase as well as improve efficiency when those configurations are
actually manufactured as sub assemblies.
The third module in the new Capital lineup is Capital
Publisher, a new generation of smart tools for creating technical publications
for service technicians. Unlike existing tools which are either paper-based or
digital equivalents of paper lacking electrical intelligence, Capital Publisher
leverages new technologies like change management, data validation and diagram
synthesis and styling to create rich, formatted electronic documentation
packages. Capital Publisher can accept electrical design data from upstream
Capital tools or third-party products, and there is a highly intuitive client
application aimed at service technicians that can present vehicle-specific
data. This significantly simplifies the task when there are high numbers of
possible vehicle configurations, O'Brien says.
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