PCB Design

[rhart]

Does anyone have any suggestions, recommendations or experiences with integrating PCB design software with Windchill? We would be designing the circuit boards, assembly and screen printing and so on then using the models in our mechanical assemblies.

We have AutoCAD, Inventor, CATIA, and Mentor integrated with Windchill but these don't seem to have the PCB circuit board design features were looking for. I found a CATIA module called CBD but not sure it does what we want or if it can be integrated with Windchill..

I see PTC has published plans to drop support for various ECAD software in future.

[SWeiler_9940261]

The strategy is to leave ECAD management to the ECAD companies like Altium. There is also a solution from xPLM.

https://www.xplm.com/our-solutions/plm-integrations/ptc-windchill/

[MP_12291332]

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@rhart counter wrote:

Does anyone have any suggestions, recommendations or experiences with integrating PCB design software with Windchill? We would be designing the circuit boards, assembly and screen printing and so on then using the models in our mechanical assemblies.

We have AutoCAD, Inventor, CATIA, and Mentor integrated with Windchill but these don't seem to have the PCB circuit board design features were looking for. I found a CATIA module called CBD but not sure it does what we want or if it can be integrated with Windchill..

I see PTC has published plans to drop support for various ECAD software in future.

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Windchill can integrate with several ECAD tools, but support for some platforms is being phased out, so it’s important to check PTC’s current roadmap. For PCB design, tools like Mentor Graphics (Xpedition), Altium, or Cadence are more commonly used, and many companies pair them with Windchill through ECAD-MCAD collaboration extensions

[avillanueva]

We've been using WTDocuments for some time to manage this since we were unimpressed by previous WGM integrations. Our amount of board design has dropped off in the past few years (out sourcing) so there is not a huge need for high level intregrations. So long as Creo View still supports publishing from those tools and we can support IDX transfers to MCAD, I am good...for now. I wonder if we are losing some capabilities by not having a deeper integration. It would have to support management of 3rd party board designs from various ECAD formats. 

[joe_morton]

We export BOMs from our ECAD tool, then use the Import Spreadsheet function to build the BOMs in Windchill for review and approval.