When Siemens PLM acquired Mentor, most observers saw a number of interesting implications. Both companies offered high-end enterprise solutions for big companies. Integrating those offerings promised some real value. What few realized, however, is the same point held true for their solutions in the SMB space.

In this post, we’ll be looking at some of the updates to the Solid Edge offering delved into at the 2018 Solid Edge University event in Boston. Let’s get underway.

Electronic and Electrical Design

John Miller, the SVP of the entire Mainstream business, opened the user group meeting by discussing the changing content in today’s products.

I have to concur with John’s point. I see a lot of companies making the transition from designing and developing traditional mechanical products to smart, connected ones. For big companies, that often means building out entirely new organizations and hiring lots of electrical and software engineers. But smaller companies don’t have that luxury, if you can call it that. Their existing engineers must expand their capacity, learn how to cobble together electronics and patch together simpler software. That’s in support of John’s point. Engineering in these companies is expanding to encompass mechanical, electrical, software, and systems.

These companies therefore need new tools. And tools that are closely integrated with the existing tools those engineers use are advantageous. That’s where the new Solid Edge Electrical offering comes into play.

A seamless connection between these offerings is valuable and extremely impactful. It essentially means that an engineer (or two engineers) can synchronize their changes between Solid Edge and Solid Edge Electrical.

For those of you who might not know, these products were formerly known as VeSys and PADS. They were both Mentor products that have moved over into the Mainstream group. But they’ve also been integrated tightly with the rest of the Solid Edge offering.

Modeling Flexibility is Key

Another front where Solid Edge has progressed is 3D modeling, although not quite in the traditional way.

Today’s engineers are now dealing with a broader array of design definitions, including mesh geometry. That might come from formats prepared for 3D printing. It might come as an output from Generative Design. It might come from 3D scanning and reverse engineering. All of these definitions rely on mesh geometry.

The key here is that Solid Edge offers a single set of modeling capabilities to support all of these scenarios. You have parametric modeling, where you can build out geometry using features and parameters. You have direct modeling, which allows you to manipulate existing geometry, regardless of how it was originally built. You have mesh modeling, which allows you to manipulate the underlying points. All are valid scenarios. Solid Edge offers a nice suite of modeling tools to deal with them all.

Sharing and Collaborating through the Cloud

A new capability being rolled out is cloud data management of Solid Edge data. This supports many of the traditional use cases where the cloud is so applicable. You can securely share intellectual property with suppliers and allow them to collaborate on it.

Supporting a Broader Range of Simulation

Last, but not least, Solid Edge now offers a broader range of simulation capabilities. This includes transient thermal analysis, which is highly applicable to electronics cooling. It also includes fluid dynamics.