I think we are getting closer though… If you own SolidWorks Premium, you have the CircuitWorks add-in. This is a product that has been around the SolidWorks community for quite some time developed by a group of Brits called “Zeal Solutions” as a gold partner solution. Dassault Systèmes SolidWorks Corp purchased this company a couple years ago now and they have given the product some great new features on top of what has already been in place for years.

The CircuitWorks user interface has been enhanced to better integrate with SolidWorks. For example, the CircuitWorks feature tree is now available in SolidWorks. Also, CircuitWorks can now update an assembly that is open in SolidWorks when you make minor changes in CircuitWorks such as adding, deleting, or moving components. Previously, CircuitWorks rebuilt the entire assembly for any change. A huge new improvement for companies that modeled their PCB in SolidWorks without the aid of CircuitWorks is the ability to import SolidWorks assemblies that represented a PCB and add it to the CircuitWorks database, so that there more design reuse and less overhead. Finally, the CircuitWorks reader for Mentor Graphics® PADS ASCII (.asc) now imports files faster and supports plated holes.

One more thing that I would like to add is the fact the you can use CircuitWorks as a viewing application. Simply create a shortcut to C:\Program Files\SolidWorks Corp\SolidWorks\CircuitWorksFull\circuitworks.exe and place it on your desktop or wherever you please. This will open the CircuitWorks Viewer, where you can open PADS and IDF format files without converting them to SolidWorks documents. You can even compare 2 PCB designs here and it will highlight the differences.

Please contact us here at CAPINC if you have more questions on CircuitWorks. We will be featuring this product in an upcoming webcast on Thursday March 11, 2010 at 3pm. Keep an eye out for it at the CAPINC seminar page. I will post a tweet about it as soon as we have a signup link ready to go.