Automotive

Altamente regolato e altamente irreggimentato.

Every day, hundreds of millions of miles are travelled in vehicles that hundreds of millions of people rely on for work, play and safety. Every technological advancement needs better control and care in design. And with such complex systems within systems, temperature extremes, dirt, chemicals and moisture, it’s little wonder these Class 3 PCB assembly designs are considered among the toughest of design challenges.

Balance Reliability with Innovation

Mature, yet cutting edge. That’s the name of the game in automotive; to find the balance between mature control systems and design methods while pushing the envelope to build the next amazing vehicle or machinery. On the one hand, you need your tools to make it easy for you to manage and re-use design data that is already proven. On the other, your tools need to make it easy for you to add new features and enhancements without failing testing and certification processes. 

Design for Reuse

Whether it be schematic symbols, PCB footprints, document templates or whole sub-circuits, our design and data management tools provide a system for capturing and managing electronic design elements that save time and cost.

Minimize Production Time and Cost

Electronic assemblies in cars have to be reliable, and they have to be efficiently put in place. Getting form factors to work into the complex chassis arrangements of vehicles can make or break success. Every added step to the assembly line and every extra second needed to install, fasten, bolt down, or tuck a board and its harness connection in place costs money. You need tools that will allow collaboration with mechanical design counterparts to guarantee assembly efficiency. You need tools that allow you to decide up front how to optimally place components and shape the board for installation.

Design For Assembly

Our Native 3D PCB design technology enables unrivalled DFA.

Design to Auto Standards

Documentation, leaving a paper trail, fulfilling requirements - all are critical in automotive electronics design. Responsibility weighs on electronics and PCB designers to make sure regulatory compliance standards are met so drivers can maintain confidence in their vehicle while on the road. Getting a vehicle or aftermarket product certified is no easy task, requiring lots of documentation, audit trails and testing. High value auto products need to be serviceable, so you need to generate high quality service documents as well.

Manage Documents and Generate Service Data

Managing projects in version control enables an audit trail from each ECO and design update to the engineering team for traceability. Document revisions to ASME Y14.35M will help maintain industry best practice, along with design release and lifecycle management. Using templates for schematics, PCB documents, production outputs and reports means you never again have to worry about documentation paper trail ambiguity.

Style and Elegance Drive Design

It’s a well known fact that automotive purchases are emotional. It means that beyond the standards for safety and reliability, vehicles are designed for beauty and elegance. Body and chassis electronics have to fit and function with that primary objective. And with consumers more conscious than ever about economy and parking space, it’s getting tougher to maintain passenger space while retaining all the electronics that make the ride enjoyable. Making your electronics form to the curves of the vehicle, while maintaining optimum space and acoustics is a serious challenge.

Create Electronics that Complement the Car

Making the PCB assembly fit to the curvature of the chassis is easier than it used to be. With full support for rigid-flex and flexible PCB design as well as 3D modeling of the bends, folds and mechanical enclosure, in-dash and body lighting with the latest LED technology can be designed in less time, giving the design team more time to explore new options.

Trustworthy Embedded Control

The only way to get the fuel efficiency and performance levels demanded by today’s drivers is to develop and employ drive by wire systems throughout the vehicle. Any modern vehicle contains upwards of 60 embedded processors enabling precise fuel mapping, acceleration, visibility, diagnostics, creature comforts and body communications to name just a few. Reducing weight enables further efficiency gains with body electronics interconnected by CAN, J1850 or ISO 9141 networks, increasing the number of embedded systems. With our children riding in the back, we care about code quality and hardware design. And with more and more hybrid and fully electric vehicles coming to market, the role of embedded systems is only getting more critical.

Develop Safe and Reliable Embedded Systems

Creating safe and reliable embedded systems does not need to hold back the whole design. Getting your embedded automotive system working fast while meeting certification and regulatory standards no longer needs to be a drag.

  • Catch code constructs and data types which are not safe for automotive and high reliability systems using MISRA C code rule checking.
  • CERT C code rule checking means you can develop code to the highest standards of security, ensuring virtually unbreakable embedded control of locks, lighting, engine management, fuel systems and more, while developing inherently more reliable code. 
    Learn More about CERT C Code Checking
  • Using our ISO 26262 certification program, we can help you efficiently get to market with automotive grade embedded code using certified tools. 
    Learn More about ISO 26262 Certification
  • By using our Software Platform Builder technology, you don’t waste time reworking low level Hardware Abstraction Layers or drivers so you can rapidly build intelligent, next generation auto electronics. 
    Learn More about the Software Platform Builder