Mentor Graphics and PTC team on electronic product data management tools

PTC (Waltham, MA), a provider of collaborative product commerce (CPC) solutions, and Mentor Graphics Corporation (Wilsonville, OR), have kicked off a cooperative development effort to support electronics industry requirements for enterprise-wide, Web-based, collaborative management of product data from system design through manufacturing and service. The resulting solutions are expected to dramatically reduce the traditional data management disconnect between work-in-process design and the enterprise manufacturing process in the electronics industry. This disconnect includes data synchronization problems, missing data, and numerous error prone manual tasks. Bridging this information gap will improve release process efficiency and benefit product development efforts that are geographically dispersed.

The integration will allow users of Mentor's Board Station design products to access and manage released design data using PTC's Windchill solution. Users will have the ability to check in, search for, and check out version-controlled design data and associated derived manufacturing files, facilitating knowledge reuse.

"Mentor Graphics realizes the importance of work-in-process design data management and the need to bridge into the enterprise PDM space. This joint effort with PTC will focus on this bridge and clearly benefit our mutual customers with a productive data management environment spanning design to manufacturing," commented Henry Potts, vice president and general manager, Mentor Graphics Systems Design Division.

"With its strong emphasis in design data management, Mentor is an important partner with whom to develop a Web-based collaborative environment to facilitate the control and management of critical electronic data," said James P. Baum, executive vice president and general manager, Windchill at PTC. "This cooperative effort is a key component of our commitment to the electronics industry."

Mentor Graphics will continue to develop work-in-process design data management products, which include EDA library management, product life cycle management and component supplier information solutions.

The first product scheduled to come out of this cooperative development agreement is an integration between Mentor Graphics' Suite of Design Architect and Board Station design tools and PTC's Windchill collaborative product commerce solution. Available in Q4 2000, the resulting new product will be developed and supported by Mentor Graphics, and sold by both companies. It will provide customers with a clean design data hand-off point between engineering functions and the enterprise and will be accompanied by a complete set of implementation and customization services available from both companies.

Edited by David Maliniak
Managing Editor, ElectronicsWeb.com