Zuken, a maker of software for electrical and electronic design and manufacturing, has released an update to its E³.series, which helps engineers track the growing complexity within today’s products and processes.

“We extended the modularity and variant management functions to empower the configuration management capabilities we recently introduced with our engineering data management environment DS-E3,” said Joachim Frank, E³.series business manager.

The company is headquartered in Germany, with U.S. headquarters in Westford, Mass.

The main updates to E³.series 2018 are in the areas of topology planning, modularity support, and variant handling and are designed to support the requirements of manufacturing companies using modular product design to control complexity.

Other highlights include:

• Extended access to detailed information in electrical and fluid diagrams, cable plans, and formboard drawings to increase productivity.
• Further automation of the autorouting functionality for cabinet layout in the E³.panel.

In terms of design reuse support, proven sub-circuits and fluid plans can be stored in a library and loaded into new designs with the aid of auto-connect functions. With E³.series 2018, sub-circuits can be imported and exported, together with their node assignments and attributes. Attributes of all related nodes can be exported automatically, maintaining their inheritance properties and and creating the prerequisites to automatically generate projects with configuration tools.

The management of circuit variants and options has been extended with the ability to display multiple connectors with different variants and options in a single symbol. The tool allows users to select individual configurations from 150 percent designs in the feature tree, from which individual configurations can be filtered. The related text, connection targets, and wires placed on the connection line are displayed automatically, as variants or options are activated in the feature tree.

With the growing adoption of modular product architectures, upfront planning and evaluation of device placement is assuming growing importance. Topology planning in E³.series has been enhanced to support loading and connecting of installation spaces to open connections. Unplaced components can be placed either into an installation space or together with an installation space.

Also, access to device properties and connection details in schematic, cable plan and formboard drawings has been enhanced to support the requirements of advanced users. A preview symbol is now displayed automatically when selecting a component in the device tree. Device table configurations can be stored as templates, so that the appropriate information for different process steps can be provided. User defined representations, such as corrugated tubes on curved connections, can be generated in the fonts library and applied to all graphical elements.

Ease-of-use has been further enhanced by additional sorting and selecting capabilities in E³.schematic. Connections can now be sorted by assignment or location only, in addition to the existing sorting option by both assignment and location. Conductors in dynamic cable and wires can be renamed in alphabetical order, and selected object types—for example, text–can be excluded or filtered from connections. The automatic routing of cables in E³.panel now also considers name equivalents in addition to equivalent symbols, so that wires can be connected precisely to their intended terminal.