Mentor upgrades wiring harness design suite

Edited by the Electronicstalk editorial team Feb 28, 2001

Mentor Graphics has upgraded its Capital H wire harness engineering software, used primarily by the automotive and aerospace industries.

Mentor Graphics has upgraded its Capital H wire harness engineering software, used primarily by the automotive and aerospace industries.

Capital H V3.0 offers users greater efficiency gains in their design-to-manufacture processes through enhanced flexibility and additional features.

Capital H V3.0 includes modular design capability, dual mode labour and material cost calculation tools and the ability to generate full scale manufacture drawings for an entire family of harnesses on a single form board.

"Today the average automobile wire harness contains more than 1000 wires, making it one of the most expensive parts of a car.

Our customers designing these complex systems require design tools with the same level of sophistication traditionally seen in chip and board design", said Henry Potts, general manager and vice president, Systems Design Division, Mentor Graphics.

"With more than 500 installations in over 15 countries worldwide, Capital H has already been proven to enable labour savings of up to 60%.

The latest version of Capital H will allow our customers to realise even greater cost reductions".

In addition to its existing capabilities for creating single harness and composite harness designs, Capital H V.3.0 offers modular design capability or customer specific harness design, enabling the production of a limitless number of harnesses to the end consumers' specific requirements.

Capital H also features two modes of labour cost and material price calculation, allowing an engineer to cost a design from the ground up, or simply to produce a difference in cost introduced by a design modification, for quicker delivery of change quotations back to the customer.

To further enhance manufacturing efficiencies, Capital H now automatically produces the full scale drawing needed to manufacture a family of harnesses on a single form board, combining the designs of individual harnesses, including all possible functionality.

The extensive reporting features of Capital H have been expanded in V3.0 with the addition of integration with Actuate e.Report Designer.

The best-in-class report and query tool, Actuate e.Report Designer enables the easy creation of professional custom outputs to the individuals' corporate requirements for harness design, manufacturing and commercial information.

Capital H V3.0 is available immediately, and the first 200 customers will also receive a complimentary copy of Actuate e.Report Designer.