Electromechanical Product Design Reimagined

EDWIN ROBLEDO: Hi, and welcome to Autodesk University Virtual Edition. I'm Edwin Robledo, and together with Kristen, we wanted to tell you about a new dimension to product design, a dimension that streamlines communication and collaboration of your next innovation by lowering design time and getting to market faster.

No matter how simple the product, it will always consist of a team of engineers from different disciplines needing to access the design files in their specialty to probe, modify, and adjust a final product. An excellent example is the every channel gap between the mechanical and the electronic engineer.

Will the PCB fit the enclosure? Will the connector be exposed correctly? Will the component height interfere with the enclosure? Do we have enough ventilation?

Traditionally, you need to find a file format that could be converted or exported for other engineers could use in their applications. This broken process is prone to errors, since units and grids must contend with the correct import. If there is a design update, there's going to be a host of calls, emails, Slack messages, and other set of file conversions that have the latest update.

Before we tell you the solution, I would like to make some introductions. Well, my name is Edwin Robledo. I joined Autodesk five years ago as part of the acquisition of CAD Soft Computer, which was the company that made Eagle software. Eagle was a significant contributor to the open hardware market, since it was the first commercially-made application to offer a free version that empowered makers and the do-it-yourself community with the opportunity of making electronic designs.

We are lucky today to be joined by Kirsten Kilroy, our product marketing manager for injection molded. Kristen, can you please tell us about you and begin our class?

KRISTEN KILROY: Thanks, Ed. Hi, everyone. My name is Kristen Kilroy. I joined Autodesk about nine years ago now as a technical support specialist for MoldFlow products. Over the years, I made my way over to the marketing team, and now currently hold the product marketing manager position for simulation products. My background is in plastics engineering, so when it comes to product design, I'm closely tied to the assembly and manufacturer ability behind it.

I'm thrilled to be here today, as I hope all of you are as well. As with other sessions you may attend this week, we need to share the Safe Harbor slide to just give you a heads up that some of the technology and information being shared in this class is still in its developmental stage, and therefore, shouldn't be relied on for making business decisions or taken as a promise of future availability of some of the technology.

The two items that I'd be talking about today are really related to the electronics sections. The majority of it is currently available, however, the component of electronics cooling, as well as a few small other pieces are still in the preview stages.

I'll pause here for another moment for you to read it on your own. And if you do have any questions, please do follow up with either Ed or myself after the class. Great, now let's get started.

Over the past several years at Autodesk University, one of our teams hosts an area called The Factory Experience. For those unfamiliar with it, this is an interactive exhibit where we walk attendees through the creation of a product, sort of like a mini product development cycle.

The reason we do this is not just for the attendees' benefits and for them to gain a souvenir on their way out, but it's also an extremely helpful experience for us Autodesk employees, as it helps us to really understand what each of you are going through each and every day in order to create a successful product. Most of us within the product teams have at least some industry experience, like Ed and myself, and work with customers pretty closely, but this is a nice refresher for us and we get to see and hear your feedback in real time while interacting at the exhibit.

Now during the Factory Experience, we consolidate a lot of the dirty bits, as you may say, such as design iterations, budgeting, time crunches, and new to us personally this year, supply chain issues. But the team who executes the exhibit does experience the ups and downs that come along with getting a product ready for manufacturing on time. So you may be wondering why I'm actually bringing this up in this class.

There are so many products being developed in such a short time to market that there is now almost a need to plan for alternate materials and components. With that, when it comes to products, product with integrated electronic components, which is pretty much everything you see these days, collaboration through a single model is key.

Ed and I, along with another coworker Garin, presented a class on electrical product design during last year's Virtual Autodesk University where we spoke about the importance of collaboration and, even more important, access to data during the product development process. This year, Ed and I wanted to present a similar session to reiterate how Fusion 360 is progressing more and more into a powerful data-driven tool for product development.

Since I kicked off with a little bit about that Factory Experience, we wanted to use this same model to share how Fusion 360 is helping project engineers and electrical engineers work for a quicker collaboration to prepare them for last minute changes as component shortages or material changes come up. The team used an Agile product development cycle. They worked with two week sprints, approaching one main goal for each sprint.

Throughout this process, they were able to finalize various aspects as they stepped through the sprints. This allowed them to plan for components that may take longer lead times, such as PCB components and plastic materials.

Here's the digital conference badge that you may see floating around the halls this week if you're attending live. The goal, as it was designed, was to have a digital name display and then an interactive component. The housing around these are to be designed so that another badge can fit in without risking human error. So it only fits in one way.

As you can see, the screen is a must along with connected buttons for the interactive portion. As the part developed, it was understood that it would have a plastic housing with a screen powered by a PCB. As the project engineer, I take those into requirements and start designing something that meets those specific needs.

With that model, Ed and I wanted to dig into the workflow that this team identified helped them with collaborating and working side by side with team members using Autodesk Fusion 360. I'll get things started by doing a brief overview of some helpful capabilities within the CAD environment for plastic consumer electronic product design.

Now when we look over features within Fusion 360 that help us to create this, there are traditional modeling tools expected from any CAD software along with some more selective tools. Here, we can see the CAD model in Fusion 360. Now let's take a quick look at the product design extension for plastic design specific tools.

Navigating to the extensions in Fusion, we can select product design, and you can read some more about the other features available. In this class, as I mentioned, we can focus on the plastic ones, which you can see here. Many of these tools really help to lessen the amount of time it takes to actually create the plastic component of a product.

Here I'm just doing a brief demonstration of the Boss feature, but I'm not going to go into depth on each of these today, as we did cover these within our 2021 AU session, but you can notice the advantage of the easy add features, especially as you get more complex with product designs.

So let's go ahead and say I went through and designed an almost finalized version of the housing. We have this here, as the good to move forward with part. The next step in a normal development cycle would be to pass this along to the electrical engineer for them to design the PCB based on the geometry I've created.

We want to position the electrical engineer for success by setting up an outline of the boundaries so that they can know the extent of where they can work. The PCB will sit on the bosses we have at the bottom of the housing, so we can use these as the plane for drawing the sketch. Again, nothing out of the norm here, just creating a normal sketch.

Next, projecting the features that really impact the geometry of the board will help us form the outline when being tied to the design. So for placement purposes, we select those bosses, and then the exterior of the part for the geometry of it.

Now offline I went through and did some cleaning up by connecting lines, removing some extra outlines, a bunch of stuff that we really didn't need. So now we have this outline created. Next, we need to create a PCB so Ed can start working his magic. Select Create and Create PCB.

If you notice-- I know it went a little quick there-- you can see, there are two options, an independent one and associative. We use the independent, but you can use either depending on your desire.

Once we select the sketch, we can see here that it generates a 3D PCB board that Ed can now use to move forward. I'll save this, and then we'll go ahead and pass it over to Ed to get us started with the electronics portion. Take it away, Ed.

EDWIN ROBLEDO: Thank you Kristen. That's awesome. I'm always so impressed by the capabilities of Fusion, and the fact that I could work in the same platform to do my electronics doesn't cease to amaze me.

By the way, we're going to be working with a badge that it's going to be using in the factory experience. Using a unified platform offered by Fusion 360, I'm able to adapt that sketch profile she created, which is going to be used for my PCB outline. But before I go there, let me tell you a little bit about the electronics about the badge itself, which is what I'm good at.

The badge you'll be building in the factory experience is inspired by an open hardware project called the Pi Badge by a leading maker company called Adafruit. If you've tinkered with electronics, I'm pretty sure you know of them. We made many modifications to the original design to get what we have today.

The processing power of the badge is based on the Raspberry Pi 2040 Microcontroller. With its 30 general purpose input/output pins, it provides us enough ports to control the connector and the crystal display. The Raspberry Pi Microcontroller's signature of its high performance, ease of use, and its low cost. Besides that, it was the one we were able to get on the supply chain for this design.

So the battery charger is being based on the microchip, the 7381 Controller. This controller is ideal for our project, since it has a very low profile and is commonly used on portable projects. It's sort of ideal for our badge.

Notice that the schematic is subdivided into multiple groups based on their functionality, connectors, audio, programming, microcontrollers display, and others. Traditionally, engineers would be using a separate application to be able to generate the electronics for our device and import the outline and the PCB using error-prone conversions. With Fusion 360, the design uses the exact same platform Kristen demonstrated a few moments ago to access electronic design capabilities. So let's go ahead and get started.

First of all, let's go ahead and access the electronic design capabilities of Fusion 360. From the file pull-down menu, we're going to select the option New Electronic Design. In the electronic document, we could either load an existing schematic or begin a brand new one. For our case, we're going to start a brand new schematic. And this is the environment. We're in Fusion 360. Notice that the interface is very similar than the rest of Fusion 360.

The first thing you always do when you work on a schematic is actually bringing in parts into your schematic. We have a host of libraries because we have a team of librarians that are only creating components. In addition to that, accessing our Library Manager gives you access to virtually thousands of additional components, because we have partnered up with many manufacturers and suppliers to be able to bring you more components, suppliers like Wurth Electronics, TE Connectivity, Panasonic, and others.

From the library manager, you're able to highlight the library, see updates in the library-- because they're live. So these are not libraries that are local. These are live libraries in which our distributors are constantly updating. Once you select any of the managed folders in which they are actually actively working on the library, you can highlight the library and download the previewer.

The previewer is going to actually allow you to view the schematic symbol, the footprint, as well as the 3D model. It's one of the primary benefits of working in Fusion 360, is that you're working with a functional 3D model of your entire design all the time.

But we are aware that we don't have all the components. There will always be some component that you need that we don't currently have available. Therefore, we have a library editor. But before I go to the library editor, wanted to let you know that we have partnered up with SnapEDA and Ultra Librarian that give you access to their components as an add on within Fusion 360. So SnapEDA and Ultra Librarian, if you go to the Add-on Store of Fusion 360, you can download them and see what they have available.

Now let's go into our Library Editor. The Library Editor is going to be divided into multiple sections. We have Components, Symbol, Footprints, and Packages. For our example, we're going to go ahead and Create a LED. So the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to select a symbol, a logical representation of an LED.

But for our example, I'm going to go ahead and import an LED from a different library, because I don't need to invent a brand new one. LEDs are a very common component, so I'm just going to go ahead and use one that we already have.

Now the next thing I need to do is create the footprint. The footprint is what's going to appear on the actual circuit board where you're going to be soldering the component into the board. Now, we have some really nice tools that make components extremely easy. This is the Pad Array, which allows you to select the distances and the dimensions of the component it will build a part for you.

We also have the same one for Plated-Through Holes, which is the other Pad Array. One was Service Monterey.

But what I really wanted to show you was our Package Editor. Pretty excited about it, because the Package Editor has a calculator with all the IPC components and more. We even have some PCB hardware here.

So from those templates that we have in the package editor, you could actually select the one that you have, and from the specification sheets that you have from the manufacturer, you could transfer that data over to the calculator. Here you could actually select what color you want the LED and the shape.

But in case you don't want to use the IPC values, because maybe you may be doing hand soldering, you could actually override the IPC value for the landings. Once you select Add, it's going to create the 3D model as well as the footprint. The construction lines that you see there are actually what is going to appear on the circuit board. And that little barrier that you see around it, it's just letting you know what is the polarity of this LED? On the left-hand side is the cathode, on the right-hand side is the anode.

Once I select OK to complete this, it's going to use an IPC naming convention to actually create the footprint and the 3D model. And this is what the footprint looks like. It's perfect and it's ready to use. But I have one more step I need to go to, and that's actually tell it what schematic symbol and which footprint it needs to use. That way I could join them. And that is called the Component.

In the Component Editor, I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to Create a brand new device. In this case, I'm going to call it Real ID. I'm going to select which schematic symbol I'm going to be using. Once I select the schematic symbol, I need to tell it which footprint I'm going to be using. But in this case, I'm lucky enough, because I used the Package Editor, so my footprint is going to automatically be associated to a 3D model.

If you can't use the Package Editor because the 3D model you need to use is appropriate by another source, no problem. You could always associate any Step file to your footprint if you want to.

Now, in the device editor, I've actually selected the footprint as well as my schematic symbol. With them already in the device editor, I'm going to be associating which pin goes to which pad. So to be able to do that, I'm going to click on the Connect command, but I just wanted to let you know where it says Mapped-- see that yellow bar there, that little yellow triangle? It's just letting me know, look, I'm not mapped up yet. So this lets you know that you've not completed your component at the moment.

So I'm going to go ahead and select Connect, and this is going to give me a list of my pins and a list of my paths. I just need to associate them correctly, and now I could go ahead and select OK and my component is completed, ready to be used in our design. So as you can see, it's extremely simple to make components if the one that you need or require is not currently available.

So now that we have been able to show you all about the Library Editor, let's go over to our schematic and start populating our schematic. So from the Place panel, I'm going to start selecting.

The first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to select my schematic outline, which is kind of what we refer to as a frame. The crosshairs that you see on the screen there is just my 0, 0 marker. We always strongly recommend that you always work on a positive quadrant when you're working on a schematic.

The next thing I want to do is start selecting my components in my design. Remember that from the Library Manager, I've selected the libraries that I want to use. This case, I'm using one that we've been using, Call for Conference Badge. I'm going to select a USB. And notice that at the bottom of the dialog box, I'm able to preview the symbol, the footprint, as well as the 3D model so I am certain I'm grabbing the one that I need to use.

Once I select it, I'm going to drag it into the schematic area and place it where I need it for our USB, as you see it labeled in the schematic sheet. It's asking me, there was a net already there grounded, asking me if I want to and I said Yes. Now I'm going to go ahead and use Connect command to define a few additional connections that I actually need.

With the schematic completed, in this case, our schematic consists of two sheets, which you could see at the bottom left corner of our screen. And now that it's all done and you can see the different subsections, as I had presented to you earlier, I'm going to go ahead and take a quick look at our building materials.

Our building materials can be selected by parts individually or by value. So let's say you have 15 resistors of a particular value. It will actually give you that summary. The attributes of the components are actually going to show up on the top of the Building Materials as the title. So depending on how many attributes you have defined, they will show up as title and you could export this in an ASCII format in which you could actually bring it into your spreadsheet.

Now from the schematic, I've created the circuit board. Remember that our schematic and our board maintain are always tied. So any changes on the schematic will update automatically on the board. And now we have our board, and it's looking really nice. We have all the components on the left-hand side.

All those lines that you see connecting between the components, those are the connections that we just have defined in the schematic. A lot of times, we refer to it as the rat's nest. Now each one of those connections we refer to individually connection as signals.

Now the default board outline that you're noticing here, this is a default board outline. It's CS one that it's not taking components into consideration like that. It's CS a default 4 by 6 inch outline. But we need to input the outline, the actual outline that we're going to be using that Kristen made for us. But before I go there, I set up my design rules that I'm going to be using, that way my board is actually manufacturable.

So to do that, I'm going to go to the manufacturing tab and select DRC. From there, we're going to open up a dialog box. This is a very useful, very simple to access dialog box. First thing I want to let you know is that many manufacturers actually provide you compatible formats of DRCs in Fusion or Eagle Format which you could actually load, or you could save one that you create, that way the rest of your team could actually commence to use it.

The next thing I'm going to do in the DRC screen is my Layer Stack Up. I can define how many layers I'm going to be using, the thickness of my layers, if I'm going to be using blind, buried vias, or if I need to set up an environment for micro vias if my component is going to be using ball grid array-style components. As you could see, the setup is actually fairly visual, so it lets you know what's going on.

Our layer stack up is pretty elaborate, because not only are you defining a layer stack up, you define the materials that you're going to be using for your dielectrics. Now we have a few models that we've already kind of found out which were the most common ones, and depending on the type of board that you're working on, you can load the model that appropriately is for your design.

So I'm going to go ahead and show you some more of the brief setups. So you have your clearances from trace-to-trace, pad-to-trace, and so forth that you need to do. On the Distant tab, you're going to set up how far the board is going to be from the board outline, your sizes for your trace width, your via sizes, your micro vias-- your annular ring is going to control the size of the plating material around your vias, which are your points of transition-- how much bigger or smaller you want your solder mass to be, as well as a miscellaneous.

The one I want to point out mainly is the maximum length for your differential pairs. I'm going to be talking about that shortly.

I'm going to go ahead and set up a two layer stack up, which is actually what I'm going to be using for my design. Now that I'm happy and I've set up, let's go ahead and import that complex outline that I don't know how I would have imported that Kristen went ahead and made for us. So let's go ahead and find out how do we do that.

So I'm setting up here how I'm going to work with-- I'm going to be selecting the devices, so on the selection filter, I select my devices. And I want my silkscreen to be outside. Now I'm in the environment that Kristen left us off a few moments ago. That's the board outline I need.

I'm going to go ahead and link it to my PCB. So I go ahead and I select it from the 3D PCB, and notice how easy was it for me to now have that outline. I didn't have to do no file conversions. I didn't have to really do anything else other than selecting the one that Kristen has. So it lets me know I have the right one. There's no guessing going on here.

Now that I've set up my DRC, I'm going to start populating my board. Now there's something I want to let you know here. I can select my component so my rat's nest, as you can see, will modify and it will automatically always look for the shortest distance.

But one thing, as I move my USB, I want to show you how it actually jumps between the board outline. And it's doing that because currently, under my DRC, I told it that I want to keep a 40 mil distance from anything that has to do with copper and the outline of the circuit board.

Now, if I change my mode to ignore violators, it will actually allow me to move that component within the violation mode, but it will actually do some hashtags letting me know I have a violation. So you have to be careful. So I like using the other mode better, but in case you need manual control of it, you could always switch over.

I'm going to go ahead and continue moving more of my components within the design outline that Kristen actually provided us. And as you can see, I've completed the design. The design here is everything in blue is actually on the bottom layer. Everything in red is actually on the top layer of my circuit board.

Now, I'm going to go ahead and before I begin routing, I'm going to push this to a 3D model. I'm going to use kind of the recommended 3D model geometry because I don't want it to take too long. And the whole reason behind this is I want Kristen to actually load this into her board, into the enclosure, and move any components that maybe I laid them out wrong. Is it interfering with the enclosure? Are my connectors correctly exposed? Is everything--

So before I begin spending the time routing, which is very satisfying, but very time consuming, I'd rather do it right once instead of having to do it in response. So now I'm going to go ahead and generate that 3D model. It should only take a few moments to create the 3D model for me. I'll go ahead and save it, and after it loads, I'm going to hand it over to Kristen, that way she can insert it and see if everything lines up correctly. So Kristen, thank you.

KRISTEN KILROY: Thanks, Ed. We'll just give this one more second here to load. There we go.

OK, so with the PCB design that Ed created so far, I, as the project engineer, am able to import this into the assembly. So I can simply insert the PCB Ed created into the assembly file as such, making sure it's aligned. Because we pulled the sketch for the boundary of the assembly, it has imported the correct position.

Once imported, I see that there are a couple of concerns with the initial placement of connectors that Ed has done. Notice how the two on the right side and one on the front just don't align right with my plastic housing. Now, think about it. Which would be easier to adjust from what Ed had just showed with being able to drag and drop different components quickly on the PCB side of things, or on my side if I were to have to adjust this and then also account for that human error component where we wanted the two parts to fit into one another?

My guess is you're thinking it's probably better on the PCB side of things. So the first thing that we need to do--

EDWIN ROBLEDO: I agree, Kristen, big time.

KRISTEN KILROY: Thanks, Ed. The first thing we need to do is use the Edit in Place feature. Given how the badge's exterior housing is configured, as I mentioned, this is a much simpler way to without having to change the geometry. So if we right click on each component that we want to move, and then easily just slide these into position. Here I'm just verifying that everything looks good, and done.

Now when you confirm the change, you may notice that that component didn't stay where I had initially dragged it to. That's because we're still an Edit in Place. Once we exit out of it, that's when the actual 3D model will update. Right now, it's just taking into account those changes that I'm making so that we can go ahead and have the trickle down effect of the whole model being updated.

Now I got all three of those in the correct spot, so now we can push these changes to the PCB design using the Push to 2D PCB button when we right click. Fusion 360 will open the electronics workspace, but since Ed will be the one to route the electrical connections to finalize the design, I'll just save this file and close it. If you notice that orange banner, Ed will see that pop up when he goes into the model next.

Back in the assembly file, we can then End the Edit in place and verify those changes do actually look good in the 3D model you can see here. So now we'll send it over to Ed again.

EDWIN ROBLEDO: Thank you, Kristen. That looks great. And thank you for catching my mistakes there and fixing it. Now it's quite amazing that these are changes that are being done by the mechanical engineer. This is something that has never been precedented before. There's no application that actually provides you the capability of modifying the PCB in the mechanical workspace, and Fusion 360 is able to do that.

Now I want to go back to the 3D model, and notice that I have some alerts there letting me know that there's some changes. And I'm going to go ahead and adopt them, that way I could see what Kristen has made. Notice that the 3D models actually move, but the holes stay behind, because I have to finish the sync between the 2D and 3D.

So now we just go ahead and push over to this 2D model of the circuit board. And once I go to the 2D model, I'm going to see this same orange banner letting me know I just got to do one more pitch to complete the synchronization. It completes a full cycle, and that way I know that the board that I have completed with the component placement and the board Kristen is working with are exactly identical.

And that was the whole reason I wanted to do this before I do routing. Routing is one of those features that is extremely satisfying, but routing can be quite intense. It could take a very long time. Notice that once I finish my cycle of synchronization, the holes now line up correctly with the 3D models and I've completed and I can now begin working on my board and routing my board.

Now I just want to let you know and remind you that the board is actually being ruled by our design rule checks that we just did earlier. And we have many ways to go about it. We have fully manual. We have some interactive, or we could use some fully automatic functions that we have in Fusion 360. And I'm just going to go ahead and show you these really quick.

OK, you can just go to the board. Now here's the board with our rat's nest, and it's ready to be routed. All my components are exactly where I need them to be. First thing I'm going to do is rope my differential pairs. Notice as they highlight. It's the first thing that happens.

And the beauty of Fusion 360 is that as I route, I always have Quick Route available. I'm routing my differential pair, and once I get really close to my destination, I can just go ahead and hit the Enter button and it will complete the route for me. I could always fine-tune that if it's necessary. I'm only going to do the differential pairs for now, and I'm going to show you some of the other features that we have when it comes to routing as well.

I'm going to go ahead and press Enter and have it complete it. And I'm going to fine-tune it. That way it doesn't have that bend that is going in there. I want it to have a better straight entrance going in there. So yeah, as you can see, I can just go ahead and fine-tune this right there.

Now I'm going to go ahead and do a Zoom to Fit, and let's go ahead and do some more routing. This time, I'm going to go ahead and show you a little bit about group routing. With a Group Route, I can select a host of signals and I can route them all at the same time. I selected these three because they actually reached a microcontroller at the same time. So I can change a distance by using the keyboard shortcuts.

Now I have the Walk Around Violator on. That's why it's going around the hole and not through the hole as I get close, as you can see there. Once I get into position, I'm just going to go ahead and press Enter and have it complete the route for me.

Now I'm going to go ahead and start using some of the automatic tools that we have it's called Quick Route. I like using Quick Route. You could use it for a particular set of layers or all the layers that you currently have available. By clicking on the signals, you see that those signals turn into routes. If you have a lot of bus configuration, this is great, because you're going to be able to just click on in because of the straight out runs. So I like using the Quick Route.

Now Quick Route has many other capabilities as well. We could use Quick Route for groups as well, and we have other features for group route. Now I just want to show you some more of the manual routing, which is usually where I handout is on the manual routing, but I'll show you some more automation in a few minutes. I do have walk around obstacles, and I could use the Spacebar to switch layers.

And you can see that the vias automatically appear. The properties of the vias are going to be based on my DRC settings that I did earlier when I set up my manufacturing system.

Now before I go there, I wanted to show you a little bit about our Push and Shove capabilities. Many electronic engineers are aware of our Push and Shove when it comes to routing only, but our Push and Shove is actually an environment. Right now, I have it active to Walk Around. I'm going to switch it to Push and Shove.

Now the nice thing about Push and Shove is that it will actually push and shove vias out of the way, vias and traces. That way, I can accommodate any new or existing components of my design. This is quite unique to Fusion 360. And why is this valuable? Usually when you're going to add new components to the board, you have to rip up big portions of the board of work that you've already done to accommodate new parts. With Fusion 360, that's not necessary. With the Push and Shove enabled, you should be set up.

Now I'm going to go ahead and invoke the Outer Router. The Outer Router is able to handle up to 16 routing layers, and you can set up the effort level. In this case, we're doing one topological route and three rip-up retry algorithms. Now notice that they're working simultaneously, and I can switch and preview them as they're working along. Depending on the complexity of the board, it may reach 99%. It may reach around 80%. It all depends on how complex the board is.

So I just want to let that you could use a combination of Manual Route and Outer Route. Nothing that I've manually done has been touched. It's only working on my signals that are available. So nothing that I've done are actually being touched.

Now that our board is totally routed, I'm really happy with what it completed at the end by doing the combination. I'm going to go ahead and define my polygons. Now polygons are very, very useful, because they help the properties of the board, that way it works correctly. It also helps for isolation as well as big start components actually reach their destinations all at the same time.

I'm going to use a selection filter to enable only the outline of the board, because I'm going to use that as my template to create my polygons. Notice how easy it actually fills up my board. And the beauty of it is that if I move any parts in the board, the polygon will automatically adjust for me.

Now I'm just going to name this polygon. In this case, my top layer is going to be Ground, and it's going to automatically connect to all of the pads and traces and vias that are carrying Ground. You'll notice that some of the components have this crosshair now, adopt a crosshair, just letting you know that that's connected to Ground.

I'm going to now do the exact same function, but I'm going to do it for the bottom layer, because I want to get a power plane for my three bolts on the bottom layer. And that easy. Now I've been able to complete my polygon fields on my board.

I'm going to go ahead and push this over to a 3D model. That way, we can take a look at what does it look like fully routed board in the 3D model.

As you can see, the 3D model now has all the traces. Now this is a functional 3D model. Those traces that you're seeing there are actually extruded bodies. So they're actually extruded bodies. All the vias are extruded bodies. So this consists of a really complete 3D model.

Now we want to create the manufacturing data. First of all, I want to tell you a little bit about the Simulation tab in the 2D PCB. We can export directly to Ansys. If you have Ansys installed, it will actually launch it, that way you could do any type of simulation that you wish to do on the circuit board as well. In addition to Ansys, I wanted to take you over to the manufacturing tab and show you about the Gerber Export.

Oh, I'm sorry. I went too fast. And before, I want to do Preview. So the Preview is going to let you know what the board looks like on the top and the bottom. This is what you're basically going to be receiving in the mail. I could actually change my solder mask colors. But the different tabs are going to give you more mechanical details of the board, how many components you have per layer, the size of the board, the thickness of the board, your layers stack up. There's a lot of useful information in which I'm going to be referencing momentarily when we reach creating a manufacturing drawing as well.

Now next thing I want to show you is about the One Click option. With the One Click option, I'm able to create my Gerber files extremely easy. It will automatically load a template based on my layer stack up-- in this case, a two layer stack up.

It's going to generate my Gerber files for my top, my bottom, my solder mask, my silt screen, but in addition to that, it will create my assembly outputs as well, which is going to be my Pick and Place as well as my building materials. It's going to be generated and it's going to put that all in one folder, and it actually compresses it as well, so it's ready to be uploaded or emailed to whatever manufacturer you want to use.

Now, the next one I want to show you is about ODB Plus Plus, and this was added recently. Remember that I told you earlier about the layer stack ups and the properties. ODB Plus Plus actually takes that information into consideration and it's added to the actual ODB Plus Plus exported file. So this is a really smart way of exporting your files.

So this is the layer stack up I'm showing you earlier. So the DRC information of the layer stack up will be added to the ODB Plus Plus export as well. Now ODB Plus Plus is used by many manufacturers. They prefer it because they can simulate the board as well.

Now the last thing I want to show you when it comes to exporting file is actually using the Cam Processor. The difference of using the Cam Processor is that you're able to make modifications on your manufacturing output. So let's go ahead and load the Cam Processor and I'll be done in a minute.

In the Cam processor, you're going to notice that it's going to automatically load the template-- in this case, a two layer template, because I only have two layers. It generates my assembly, my builder material, as well as my Pick and Place. But notice that it has a previewer. So I could preview, make sure that my layer combination is correct.

In addition to that, I can make modifications to the sections. For example, for my silkscreen, I actually like including additional layers because I want on the silkscreen to appear some basic information for my manufacturer. So I may put it on a document layer on a reference layer. That way, they could actually take a look at it. And that information is going to be part of my silkscreen.

I could do the same thing for my Gerber files, or I could also do the same for my ODB Plus Plus files that are here. So when you export from the Cam Processor, you're going to get both of them. The same happens on ODB Plus Plus. You get the previewer as well. So there I'm previewing my copper top layer. I'm previewing my bottom copper layer as well.