<strong>Altair’s Acquisition of Concept Engineering Bolsters their Smart Visualization Platform to Accelerate the Development, Manufacturing, and Service of Complex Electrical Systems</strong>

Who is Concept Engineering?

As an early innovator in electronic system debugging and visualization, Concept Engineering has been delivering smart solutions to the semiconductor industry for more than 32 years. With this acquisition, Altair’s EEvision solution leverages these capabilities by generating easy-to-read high-level schematics on-the-fly that are compact and simplify the exploration of complex electrical systems. But make no mistake, EEvision is not just about schematics and visualization. It provides a data-driven, open, and customizable development and service process that leverages digital twin technology.

How is this Technology Differentiated?

Historically, companies that develop complex electrical systems utilize schematic editor tools from ECAD (EDA) or MCAD electrical tool vendor systems to create their schematic diagrams. The problem with performing electrical design with these types of systems is they are most often flat approaches (vs hierarchical) that result in multi-page documents that are not only difficult to navigate and manage but also lack service documentation capabilities and present full model part variant data versus product specific data both of which make the process complicated and time-consuming.

What data formats can EEvision collaborate with?

The EEvision platform was designed to import CAD, proprietary, and MBSE tool data via various EBD plug-ins and APIs. This approach makes it easy to either connect the EBD interface to CAD tools or to directly generate or import CAD in data formats including creator APIs, Microsoft Excel, and CSV files for example with no manual translation. From these sources, data automatically renders schematics of circuits, wiring harnesses, and component attributes specific to individual development and maintenance situations on-the-fly ensuring precise information is created quickly and easily understood.

Summary and Takeaways

Altair’s acquisition of Concept Engineering integrates computational science and AI into an advanced state-of-the-art electronics visualization and engineering solution. As part of Altair’s digital twin solution, EEVision empowers teams to render schematics of circuits, wiring harnesses, and component attributes such that complex electrical systems can be easily and quickly understood in real-time. This reactive visualization solution not only provides an intuitive and optimized graphical depiction of complex system designs but also debug capabilities for electronic systems that enhance products with minimal integration effort.

This solution can certainly help organizations accelerate their designs that have specific design architecture requirements, as well as rigorous service needs. I look forward to following along as Altair continues to integrate and leverage Concept Engineering technology to turn complex data into accurate and actionable smart data.