Autodesk Fusion 360 unifies electrical and mechanical design in one platform.
Autodesk has sponsored this post.
Imagine a world where printed circuit boards have no housing and where smart devices have no brains. Where mechanical engineers and electrical engineers are locked in a fierce war of attrition, each group unwilling or unable to view the other as human. A world where your smart water bottle does nothing more than hold water and your smart water bottle PCB does nought but get wet.
A horrible vision, to be sure, and one that shall not come to pass if Autodesk has its way—and Autodesk’s way is Fusion 360, their cloud-based product design and manufacturing platform that aims to do it all. Mechanical and electrical, united at last; plus rendering, simulation, manufacturing, generative design and a bunch of other stuff. For a closer look at Autodesk’s vision for Fusion 360, a product design swiss army knife in the cloud, check out Why Fusion is 360.
In this article, we take a look at Fusion 360’s integrated electrical design workspace. Based on the popular EAGLE PCB design software, which Autodesk acquired in 2016, Fusion 360’s PCB capabilities are now up to par and pair up two design domains, ECAD and MCAD.
EAGLE in Flight
In June 2016, Autodesk acquired software provider CadSoft, developer of the long-standing EAGLE PCB design platform. Though EAGLE wouldn’t make its way into Fusion 360 for a few years, the acquisition was a deliberate step in that direction.
“The acquisition of EAGLE marks a new phase in not just EAGLE’s development, but in Autodesk’s as well,” wrote Autodesk Senior Marketing Manager Sam Sattel in a blog post reflecting on the acquisition. “You see, we’re serious about becoming the standard for the design and manufacture of the whole product/widget/whathaveyou and this move into electronics is the next big frontier in our development as that company… the acquisition of EAGLE marks our push into the next big frontier: the board.”
As soon as EAGLE joined Autodesk, it was in the gravitational pull of Fusion 360. For a few years, EAGLE remained a standalone PCB design application, just as it was under CadSoft. Autodesk began creating a bi-directional workflow between EAGLE and Fusion 360 mechanical design, and soon began offering EAGLE subscribers complimentary access to Fusion 360. Eventually that paradigm flipped, and it was Fusion 360 subscribers who were given access to EAGLE. Today, the only way to buy EAGLE is to subscribe to Fusion 360.
EAGLE Nests in Fusion 360
In 2019, Autodesk announced its plans to bring EAGLE fully into the Fusion 360 fold. Just as Fusion 360 offers dedicated workspaces for mechanical design, rendering, manufacturing and all the rest, now it would offer a dedicated electrical design workspace based on EAGLE.
“It’s a professional-grade PCB design tool, but it’s all built into the Fusion 360 environment, which facilitates that natural collaboration with mechanical design and other stakeholders,” said Ben Jordan, Senior Product Manager for Fusion 360 Electronics at Autodesk.
A similar story has occurred on the manufacturing side of Fusion 360, with legacy CAM tools such as PowerMill, FeatureCAM and Netfabb being woven directly into the cloud platform. These tools, and EAGLE too, continue to have standalone applications external to Fusion 360 which come bundled with a subscription.
“EAGLE is still maintained, and anyone with a Fusion 360 subscription automatically has access,” Jordan explained. “It can be installed side by side, so people with that familiar workflow don’t have to change immediately. But Fusion 360 really is the future, and so the development focus is on Fusion 360.”
Though it may look a bit different, Fusion 360’s integrated electrical design workspace is based on EAGLE’s code. It can do everything EAGLE does and more, according to Jordan.
“[Fusion 360] has somewhat more advanced routing, and obviously direct modeling of the components,” he said.
That last point may not be so obvious, but it’s one of the key advantages of Fusion 360’s integrated electrical workspace. As with all Fusion 360 workspaces, different elements of a design—for instance, its electrical and mechanical elements—are fully linked. One need only switch from the electrical to mechanical workspace to shift perspective from, say, routing components on a PCB to seeing the 3D model of that PCB in its proper mechanical context.
“Once you push your PCB to the mechanical side, you have true 3D components with mechanical properties where you can run e-cooling simulation,” said David Marrakchi, Autodesk’s Marketing Manager for Fusion 360’s electronic workspace.
MCAD and ECAD Collaboration
By bundling both mechanical and electrical design in a unified package, Fusion 360 aims to solve one of the biggest problems that Autodesk sees in product development.
“We find hardware engineering has trouble in workflows where you have to collaborate with other people,” Jordan said. “Autodesk sought to make design more efficient in those collaborative workflows, and ECAD-MCAD is a big one. Different EDA vendors have tried to tackle this in different ways, with clunky file formats and importing and exporting, but it’s just not the same as having one tool that natively owns all the design data. And that means one person can design the entire product in Fusion 360 from the mechanical assembly all the way to the PCB layout.”
This enhanced collaboration is not just a just a nice byproduct of Fusion 360—it’s the whole point of the software. Any platform that aims to provide a single environment for multidisciplinary teams to collaborate must contend, eventually, with electronics. After all, reflected Marrackchi, an electrical engineer with extensive industry experience, “I never worked in any place where I did not have to collaborate with a mechanical engineer.”
“The collaboration is really the emphasis,” added Jordan. “For example, a mechanical designer may need to relocate a connector on the board to suit the mechanical assembly, and that will synchronize in a controlled way back to the PCB and even reroute the connections. That level of collaborative workflow is really not matched in anything else I’ve seen. Every other solution is two separate tools made by two different companies.”
Autodesk’s efforts to bridge the ECAD/MCAD gap are appreciated by customers, among them smart water bottle developer LifeFuels. Though the company recently ceased operation, its engineering team had nothing but praise for Fusion 360’s collaborative capabilities.
“Having the cloud collaboration, having the immediate changes from the rest of your team, having very easy-to-find workflows going into the mechanical side makes everything a lot easier, especially with this product where we have very tight tolerances and not a lot of space,” praised Abraham Maclean, LifeFuel’s Embedded Engineering Manager.
The Future of Fusion 360
Fusion 360’s foray into the world of ECAD doesn’t end with its EAGLE integration. SnapEDA, an online library of electronics components, recently unveiled an add-on that will allow users to search and download SnapEDA models directly from Fusion 360.
Fusion 360 also provides integrated simulation capabilities that allow designers to run electronic cooling studies. “You can do the full assembly with mechanical and the PCB inside, and you can assign power dissipation to some of the chips on the board and run a computational fluid simulation,” Jordan explained. This simulation can reveal hot spots and help designers decide whether to add extra fans or relocate components.
“In a separate ECAD and separate MCAD, there’s all sorts of things that would slow down that whole process quite a bit,” Jordan asserted.
By adding integrated ECAD to its repertoire, Fusion 360 has moved another step closer to its ultimate vision of an end-to-end product design platform. But Autodesk isn’t pulling the brakes anytime soon. “There is some pretty cool stuff on the way,” Jordan teased.
To learn more about Fusion 360 for ECAD and MCAD, visit Autodesk or read our companion articles Why Fusion is 360 and Getting it Made in Fusion 360.
