Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1523825
JULY 2024 I DESIGN007 MAGAZINE 13 where the finish line is. ey understand the mechanical and electronics guidelines, which makes it really nice. at's a big advantage. I think that's a big attraction for electronics companies. It just makes financial sense. Now, one downside is that you're now asking an individual to do two jobs. As I mentioned, the EEs are pretty well spent at this point. Plus, if you ask most universities about the training that EEs receive, you'll find they don't even get PCB design training, and now you're asking them to add on mechanical design as well. Another downside is that there are no training courses available for some- thing like this. Speaking of which, now I want to head over to the mechan- ical department and talk to them about this combination of MCAD and ECAD and how we can improve the curriculum at Palomar College with mecha- tronics. Matties: Who will move over to mechatronics—the ECAD or MCAD people? It will most likely come from the mechanical side. In my course, about 60% of my class are mechanical designers who come in to learn printed circuit board design. ere are probably another 20% who are EEs, and the rest are miscellaneous. I would say the number of mechanical people doing PCB design has definitely risen over the past few years. I'm also dispelling the misconception that you must be an EE to do printed circuit board design. We're slowly chiseling away at that. We have folks in my class who were not even involved in electronics in any way, and found this to be a very attractive career. One con- struction worker came in wanting a career change. He did the work, and he's now a PCB designer. I think we're definitely swinging away from the EEs in design. Shaughnessy: For years, we've been hearing about this supposed convergence of ECAD and MCAD, but I was skeptical because the two disciplines even have different lan- guages. Now, some PCB design CAD tools offer MCAD capabilities. Will it ever be a seamless process? It is seamless now, yes. Years ago, if you were working with your MCAD guy, you had to cre- ate a 3D STEP file of your PCB, drop it some- where, or email it, hoping it wasn't too big. en the mechanical guy picked it up from a central location and he had to then drop it in and pull the old board out and drop in the new board. He had to make sure that everything was still working with no collisions. Now this whole process has been reduced down to pushing a button, and it immediately goes over to the mechanical side. I may have to come up with new reasons when my boss asks why things took so long: "Pushing the button was really tough." But there was a big separation, and even the integration of ECAD and MCAD is a new concept. I spent so much time with thousands and thousands of STEP mod- els. I could have saved a huge amount of time if I could have just pushed a button. I do believe that the ECAD and MCAD people are play- ing nicer now, and there's better collabora- tion between them. I know that on the ECAD side, there's more demand for collaboration between different tools. But how do we inte- grate it? How do we push this whole concept forward? Johnson: Another factor might be that we did not have the compute power to conceive of a design tool that could do both MCAD and ECAD at the same time. at's very true. I would say the number of mechanical people doing PCB design has definitely risen over the past few years.