K.V. Solovyev

At present time, the major tendencies in the change of requirements applicable to the products of existing defense industry enterprises are the following: - reduction of the time needed from the start of a product-s design until its serial production; - improvement of the designed products - quality; - reduction of a product-s design cost. Given the above-mentioned requirements, implementation of a product lifecycle management (PLM) system at a defense industry enterprise is just a matter of time. A PLM system is a managerial and engineering system that provides for managing all the information regarding a product-s design and the related processes through its whole lifecycle. Another aspect of successful compliance with the requirements applicable to the products of the present-day defense industry enterprises is an inevitable increase in the number of electronic components used in the products designed, accompanied by a general product miniaturization. With the use of up-to-date electronic equipment, Russian air defense systems will be able to satisfy the most stringent requirements applicable to products of this kind. Designing up-to-date electronic equipment is presently impossible without the use of specialized CAD software allowing to automatically carry out routine operations when creating PCB layouts, as well as to make automated validity checks on these layouts. In the context of the above-named aspects, attempts of integration of a PLM system with PCB CAD software are of particular interest. In order to make such integration possible, the following problems should be solved: - to ensure the library of electric radio products (ERP) used in the CAD software corresponds with the list of components registered in the PLM system, plus elaborate a mechanism for updating and amending the library with respect to ensuring such correspondence; - to elaborate a mechanism for importing a product-s structure from the CAD software (from the circuit editor as well as from the PCB editor) to the PLM system. One of the solutions to ensuring the correspondence between the ERP library used in the CAD software and the component library of the PLM system is to establish a library service at the enterprise, which would be responsible both for managing libraries in PCAD and for their automated reflection in Windchill. This could make it possible, along with solving the problem of libraries - integration, to introduce a uniform approach to forming a library database of ERP at the enterprise and to spare developers and engineers the need to create library components themselves, allowing them to concentrate on the design process. Possible solutions to the problem of importing a product-s structure from the CAD software to the PLM system are the following: - an integration program module is written using the enterprise-s own resources, especially since PCAD allows saving project files in text format which makes it possible to analyze them syntactically and to import product structure using software; - the data of a PCB project are imported from the Altium Designer or Cadence Allegro CAD software, which, in their turn, can read PCAD project data and are supported by the built-in integrator of Windchill 10.0. Successful solution of the problems outlined above will allow system creation at the enterprise which will make it possible to reduce the time needed for layout of printed board assembly: it is automatically checked at the stage of importing a project to Windchill that the library components used in a project are allowed for a given set of components. Documentation release goes faster to a printed board assembly, because it is formed automatically basing on the printed board assembly structure stored in Windchill. This also makes it possible to improve the designed products - quality: only library components preliminarily created and verified by the library service are used in the products. The cost of producing a printed board assembly is reducing: design goes faster, documentation release is automated, the number of possible mistakes occurring when component libraries are decentralized goes lower.