Mentor Takes a Lifecycle Approach to Electrical Design

In a move that has echoes of the mechanical design world'sProduct Lifecycle Management (PLM), MentorGraphics announced a significant expansion of its Capital electricalengineering platform with new products designed to take the coverage downstreamto product definition and upstream through service and support.

Capital, which replaces Mentor's existing CHS brand ofelectrical system and wire harness design tools, takes more of a lifecycleapproach to electrical system and wire harness design and is a reflection ofMentor's second strategic phase of development in this product sector,according to Martin O'Brien, general manager of the Mentor Integrated ElectricalSystems Division. "The original suite was a set of design tools to create theelectrical system and design of the harnesses," O'Brien explains. The newCapital suite delivers on all of its traditional capabilities in addition tonew functionality for designing the architecture and aiding service technicianssupporting the finished product in the field. It also encompasses enterprisedata management and compliance functionality, serving as a single repository tohelp manage and support the highly specialized materials and workflowsassociated with seeing a complex electrical system through each phase of itslifecycle.

Mentor's second-phase strategy is in direct response tosurging importance of electrical and electronics components in a range of discreteproducts-from cell phones to airplanes. Some 40 percent of the cost of a newvehicle is directly tied to electronics content and this area has become a keysource of competitive advantage across a wide variety of product categories. Asa result, manufacturers need a richer and more integrated set of tools, O'Briensays, to manage the complexity around cost, weight, configurations andcompliance, and the new lifecycle approach with Capital is intended to providesuch 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 electricalengineering design.

"This is a complex data flow, and there are longlifecycles," he explains. "Compared to a IC or PCB component which never getsfixed, an aircraft can have a lifecycle of up to 50 years and a car up to nineyears. You have to maintain an understanding of what the electrical systemlooks like on these products over the course of their lifecycle."

Dick Slansky, senior analyst at ARC Advisory Group, agrees that with the risein complexity of so-called "smart products" packed with electronics andembedded software content, electrical design needs to be considered as anintegral part of the PLM umbrella. Forthe most part, 80 percent of existing eCAD tools are specifically focused onthe design of printed electronic circuit boards and don't take a systemsengineering approach to the entire product. "What companies are trying to do isget to the early stage integration of all the disciplines together to form asystem engineering or functional specification approach," he explains. Via thenew line of Capital products, Mentor is pushing the full spectrum of electricaldesign as part of core lifecycle platform - a bridge manufacturers have beenrequesting as they struggle with mechatronics design.

Configuration Complexity

The new Capital suite adds three new tools to expandcoverage across these areas, building on the original platform's focus on the designdomain. Two of the new offerings address the challenge of configurationcomplexity management-the explosion of possible configurations of electricalsystems, be they in cars or in aircraft, depending on the model or variant anddriven 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 tohelp deliver numerical feedback on configuration complexity and the resultingcosts. Different vehicle models and optional electronic content create hugeconfiguration complexity for each platform and as part of the design process,manufacturers want to narrow the scope of possible choices or combine them insuch a way as they are optimally costed. Capital Level Manager is typicallyused at the early stage platform definition phase of a project as the means ofproviding qualitative trade-offs between marketing imperatives and engineeringrealities. The tool captures the product plan and calculates the configurationcomplexity, helping identify candidates to reduce complexity (give away) andquantifying the cost impact of decisions.

The Capital ModularXC addition comes into play to supportwhat's known as the alternative modular process, where multiple configurationsare constructed from harness fragments much like letters of an alphabet wouldbe used to build words. Capital ModularXC defines the wire harness fragmentsand manages the relationships between them, at both the design phase (optionalfeatures) and build phase (production sub-assemblies) so it can streamline theconfiguration phase as well as improve efficiency when those configurations areactually manufactured as sub assemblies.

The third module in the new Capital lineup is CapitalPublisher, a new generation of smart tools for creating technical publicationsfor service technicians. Unlike existing tools which are either paper-based ordigital equivalents of paper lacking electrical intelligence, Capital Publisherleverages new technologies like change management, data validation and diagramsynthesis and styling to create rich, formatted electronic documentationpackages. Capital Publisher can accept electrical design data from upstreamCapital tools or third-party products, and there is a highly intuitive clientapplication aimed at service technicians that can present vehicle-specificdata. This significantly simplifies the task when there are high numbers ofpossible vehicle configurations, O'Brien says.