Product category:
Design and Development Software
News Release from: Mentor Graphics UK | Subject: Capital Manufacture and Capital Factory
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 04 March 2002
Capital ideas in next-generation harness
design
Capital Manufacture and Capital Factory are the first in a next-generation family of products from Mentor Graphics for the design, engineering and manufacture of electrical wire harnesses.
Capital Manufacture and Capital Factory are the first in a next-generation family of products from Mentor Graphics for the design, engineering and manufacture of electrical wire harnesses Mentor Graphics conceived Capital Harness Systems (CHS) in collaboration with leading automotive and aerospace OEMs and their suppliers to address the wire harness design requirements of the automotive and aerospace industries
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 21 Feb 2001 at 8.00am (UK)
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Capital Manufacture and Capital Factory are available immediately.
Mentor Graphics will introduce additional products in the CHS family over the next 18 months.
"Many OEMs and suppliers in the automotive and aerospace industries are using internally-developed applications to manage an extremely complex wire harness design process.
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Instead of concentrating on building their core products, these companies are finding themselves maintaining software that has to continually grow in scope", said Martin O'Brien, general manager, harness systems business unit, Mentor Graphics.
"With Capital Harness Systems tools, Mentor will provide the industry with data-centric solutions to address all aspects of the harness flow for the first time".
As electronic content in cars has grown, the number and complexity of electrical circuits has also compounded.
Modern aircraft may have more than 150km of wires interconnecting a myriad of electronic systems.
As electrical design data grows, additional business issues affecting the automotive and aerospace industries are also impacting the wire harness design process.
For example, the growing use of third-party outsourcing requires data sharing up and down the supply chain throughout the design process and product lifecycle.
Global competition is also driving the need for speeding time-to-market and reducing manufacturing costs through design efficiencies.
CHS expands on the strengths of the Capital H tool, the wire harness design for manufacture product that Mentor Graphics gained through the acquisition of Harness Software Group in October 2000, to offer an integrated flow for the creation of complex electrical wire harnesses.
Logical Cable, Mentor's existing family of tools for the logical design of wire harnesses, is also included in CHS and will be further enhanced in future releases.
The CHS family addresses the issues facing the automotive and aerospace industries today, providing a complete flow of tools to handle the complexity more efficiently.
Built on a component-based data model and electrical database, CHS facilitates information sharing throughout the enterprise and its entire supply chain.
Capital Manufacture is a set of software tools that enables the design and engineering of wire harnesses for manufacture.
Capital Engineer allows users to build and validate harness designs and produce full manufacturing bill-of-materials.
Capital Engineer supports complex wire harness configurations, including options, variants and modules.
The suite also includes Capital Costing, offering sophisticated and comprehensive reporting, analysis and costing features that allow users to generate accurate labour and material cost estimates.
Capital Manufacture's Design System Interface (DSI) allows data to be imported from other electrical computer aided design (ECAD) and mechanical computer aided design (MCAD) systems, giving users maximum flexibility and data re-use options.
Capital Factory facilitates the fabrication and production of complex wire harnesses.
Capital Formboard, the first product in the Capital Factory suite, automates the creation of wire harness formboard drawings, onto which the wire harness is assembled.
Capital Formboard automates the often difficult and time-consuming creation of production formboards, generating outputs based on the harness representation in Capital Manufacture.
As design changes are made, Capital Formboard compares the new version to the preceding harness definition, and re-uses as much of the existing definition as possible, allowing the user to update only the areas that have changed.
Capital Formboard consolidates designs, giving users the option to manage several harnesses from a single formboard drawing, making the process more efficient.
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