Bosch Rexroth is a Fortune 100 company and one of the world’s largest suppliers of technology and services. For nearly half a century, the company has been developing corporate policies and engineering practices that protect people and the environment and reinforce the importance of sustainability.

When done correctly, green engineering practices can yield incredible returns. Organizations can experience reduced costs, improved product performance and a better corporate reputation. Green engineering can also open up further market opportunities and offer engineers a new career path.

Electronic engineers alone can influence the environmental impact of their products by adhering to one of the following design principles: green engineering, sustainable design, green design or design-for-environment. Engineers must also consider product life cycle, reusability and how to eliminate toxic chemicals before they can start touting themselves as “green”.

Bosch Rexroth’s engineering division decided to design its latest Rexroth Frequency Converter Fe series to be more economical and environmentally friendly. The device, an industrial converter for open-loop-applications, was simple enough, but to realize the environmental objectives, the engineers needed to reduce parts, size and power consumption, while improving reliability and stability.

Big Results for a Smaller Carbon Footprint

With Altium Designer, the engineering team saw immediate benefits for Bosch Rexroth, with its user-friendly interface and improved features for board design.

As Wang Jianyan, Technical Director for Bosch Rexroth China, elaborates, “Altium Designer has delivered incredible time-to-market and cost-cutting advantages that have also worked into our green electronics strategy. We are able to complete our boards in half the time whilst reducing materials, power consumption and increasing reliability. Green electronics are the future, and Altium is helping get us there quicker.”

Altium Designer’s intelligent pin and part swapping capabilities simplify board layout, effectively reducing the numbers of layers used and overall board size. Engineers are left with a more lean and green board design that requires fewer materials.

“Using Altium Designer’s pin and part swapping features lets us halve our development time. We can watch as the software reassigns pins and nets automatically. This makes our boards more reliable and compact because our layout is much cleaner. To achieve this kind of result used to take days; this is now done in seconds,” comments Jianyuan.

Leaner and Greener

Reducing materials and waste is central to successful green engineering. Using Altium Designer’s integrated database libraries, Bosch Rexroth can link into its various ERP systems to Altium Designer. With all its databases tightly knitted together, Bosch Rexroth can easily oversee suppliers, factory, reseller, and even customer information, monitor resources and manage waste with greater efficiency. 

“With Altium Designer, we have been able to control and monitor our resources more effectively. This has two benefits: we reduce parts and waste and minimize our total production costs. Altium Designer has also reduced the design cycle of the sensor controls of our transducers from three weeks to two weeks. This is a 30% increase in efficiency. Without this tool, we would have never made our frequency converters to Bosch Rexroth’s strict environmental and performance targets,” concludes Jianyuan.