Individual: For those who will be using SOLIDWORKS Electrical and will not be sharing their electrical data between users.

Network: For those who will be sharing their electrical data between users over a network connection. This installation involves a server and client installation.

I’ve broken up the installation instructions into two parts; one for individual installations or upgrades and another for network installations or upgrades. You just need to find the appropriate section and follow the instructions in that section.

In order to access the installation media, please refer to the first part of our installation guide for SOLIDWORKS 2023.

Note: Prior to any upgrade or changes to existing SOLIDWORKS Electrical software or networks, have all users create an environment archive to ensure that you do not lose your data in the case of a failed upgrade.

Install SOLIDWORKS Electrical for Individuals

There are two scenarios for installing SOLIDWORKS Electrical 2023 for a single-user local installation. You can start with a new installation or upgrade, found in section 1a, or add it to an existing installation of SOLIDWORKS. You’ll find those instructions in section 1b. Once you finish either of these sections, continue to section 1c, as all the remaining steps are the same for both.

1a. New Install/Upgrade:

Select the Install on this computer option and click Next.

1b. Adding to an Existing Installation:

Select the Modify your installation option and click Next.

1c. Remaining steps

On the next page, you can add the serial number for SOLIDWORKS Electrical. After you’ve entered your serial number(s), click Next.

The following screen is the Product Selection page. Here, you have the option to install any additional products. If you’re not taken to the Product Selection page and find yourself on the Summary page, you may select the Change link in the Products section to return to the Product Selection page. The below image shows the appropriate settings for an Individual Install with the end user machine being the SQL Server host.

• Note that SOLIDWORKS Electrical 3D requires SOLIDWORKS 3D CAD and is only included with purchases of SOLIDWORKS Electrical 3D or SOLIDWORKS Electrical Professional. It is not included in SOLIDWORKS Schematic Standard or Professional.

Click Next to get to the SOLIDWORKS Electrical Options menu, or Back to Summary followed by Change in the Electrical Options portion of the Summary page.

On the Electrical Options page, you will specify the desired folder of your Data Location and specify the SQL Server Name. See the image below for the default entries.

A Note About SQL Server and SOLIDWORKS Electrical 2023

If you’re using an existing SQL instance, enter your existing login and password. By default, the SQL Server Authentication login password for the “sa” user is blank.

You may wonder if you could use an existing SQL instance that’s shared with another program. We really don’t recommend this option and strongly suggest that SOLIDWORKS Electrical has a dedicated instance of SQL Server.

If you have not set up a SQL Server instance before, you can install a new one as shown in the image below. You can specify the name of the new instance and give it a password below. The password must meet Windows security requirements, which you can find more information on in the “Potential Errors” section at the bottom of this article.

Click Back to Summary or Next to return to the Summary page and click Install Now (or Modify Now if adding to an existing installation of SOLIDWORKS).

Network Server Installation or Upgrade

If you intend to have a collaborative environment for the SOLIDWORKS Electrical software, you can follow the steps below to install or upgrade the SOLIDWORKS Electrical Server components on your server host system. This must be done on the server host system and should not be installed from the client system unless your system is set up as the SQL Server host and sole user.

It is extremely important to upgrade the server components prior to the clients. If you upgrade and connect a client to the server prior to upgrading the server components, you could run into mass data corruption and loss of information.

Prior to moving forward, it is recommended to use SQL Standard rather than SQL Express if you expect to have more than 5 users accessing the server at one time. In addition, the server and client machines will need to be on the same subnet.

• One thing I want to make note of is the version of SQL Server. As of SOLIDWORKS 2021, you cannot use SQL Server 2014. So, if you’re upgrading from 2021 or older, make sure you check your SQL Server version.

Upon starting the installation manager, select the Install on this machine option. On the Product Selection page, your selections should be as shown in the image below.

The reason for including the client install on the server is that it provides the ability to make environment archives from the server machine where your information is stored locally rather than connecting to it over your network.

SOLIDWORKS Electrical Additional Options

You can continue following the steps we provided above for the Individual Install/Upgrade process until you reach the SOLIDWORKS Electrical Options page. You will want to install all features for the server and specify the following:

• Data Location
  • Please work with your IT department to determine a suitable location for the Data Location.
  • You can put this on the C:\ drive of the server or set it elsewhere on another drive local to the server host.
  • You need to make sure this is a shared location for all SOLIDWORKS Electrical users.
• Collaborative Server
  • Name
    • You can leave this as “localhost”
  • Port Number
    • By default this is “26666” but you can reconfigure it as needed for your network firewall
• SQL Server
  • Name (formatted as [Name]\[SQL Instance Name], by default this is “localhost\TEW_SQLEXPRESS”)
  • Password for ‘tew’ user (by default this is “SQLpwd4ew”)

Following the installation, you will also need to set up both inbound and outbound firewall TCP and UDP port rules for ports 1433-1434 and 26666-266##. The later series of ports will start with 26666 (or what port you specified) and increment up to the number of users expected to be on the server at one time. (If you expect to have a max of 5 users, you would set up rules for 26666-26671). When setting any of these rules, we will want to select Allow the connection and have all boxes checked when prompted When does this rule apply.

Network Client Installation or Upgrade

The instructions to upgrade a Network Client are nearly identical to the Individual installation. The main difference is that you can uncheck the Collaborative Server and Data options on the Product Selection page, since these will be provided by the network server.

Once you get to the Summary page, select Change in the Electrical Options section. Fill in each section of this page as follows.

• Data Location: should be formatted as \\[Server IP address]\[Folder specified in server installation]. It is important to use the format referenced above. Using a mapped drive location will cause issues.
• Collaborative Server Name: Server IP address
• Port Number: 26666 is the default
• SQL Server Name: formatted as [Server IP Address]\[SQL Instance Name]

Potential Issues When Installing SOLIDWORKS Electrical 2023

Causes

Invalid permissions

• Machine
• SQL

Connection

• Firewalls
• Anti-virus
• Network connection
• Install settings

Password

• Incorrect password
• TEW password length (also seen as 27506)
• You may see this error come up as 27502 (if they have SOLIDWORKS PDM Professional). Or you may see it as 27506 (if there is no SOLIDWORKS PDM Professional but you’ve enabled password restrictions)

Install settings

Causes:

Invalid permissions

• Upgrade from major version
• SQL database owner

Installation settings

• Incorrect options chosen
• Admin image

Causes:

SQL cannot create an instance

• Permissions
• System restart

If you need help with any errors please don’t hesitate to contact us for support.

Curran Kneebone
Support Engineer
Computer Aided Technology

From 2D to 3D in Electrical 2023

In SOLIDWORKS Electrical 2023, communication and design are more efficient in both 2D and 3D. You can now define a part’s properties in 2D and have them propagate to the associated 3D model. From there, you can use these properties to complete a table, like a bill of materials. The weight information (which also transfers from 2D to 3D) will override the mass properties. All of the properties for the 3D component are stored in one location defined by the manufacturer’s part. This makes it easier to communicate accurate design data with mechanical teams.

Labels in Your Project Configurations

Electrical project configurations are a great way to employ specific settings, and in 2023 we can now also specify Dynamic Connection Labels. This will allow the electrical team the flexibility to create tables and labels for connectors on the fly, while still using the project configuration settings and company standards.

Multiple SOLIDWORKS Electrical Report Improvements

Reports create the desired project deliverable that we need, and sometimes those are in various formats and orientations. In SOLIDWORKS Electrical 2023, when exporting a PDF, we can automatically output the report or page in the correct orientation. This is a big time saver.

The improvements to reports don’t stop there. You can now insert report tables anywhere in a project, and you can also copy and paste reports while maintaining associativity. Altogether, these improvements increase control, eliminate manual update tasks, and expedite the PDF export process.

SOLIDWORKS Electrical now supports a wide variety of formats for images, so you no longer need to convert everything to BMP format. Creating symbols and adding logos or graphics in their native format streamlines the process and maximize efficiency.

These were just a few of the great enhancements in SOLIDWORKS Electrical 2023. The expanded capabilities to manage components and their properties, along with added flexibility to reports and document schematics, plus more, will improve communication, save time, and increase productivity.

I hope this part of the What’s New series gives you a better understanding of the new features and functions of SOLIDWORKS 2023. Please check back to the CATI Blog as the CATI Application Engineers will continue to break down many of the new items in SOLIDWORKS 2023. All these articles will be stored in the category of “SOLIDWORKS What’s New.”

David Foster
Sr. Application Engineer, Electrical
Computer Aided Technology

What is Design Innovation Month?

DESIGN INNOVATION MONTH 2022 – Live Events, Webinars, Virtual Showroom, Contests

Design Innovation Month is CATI’s “What’s New in 2023” event for SOLIDWORKS, 3DEXPERIENCE, and 3D Printing & 3D Scanning technology. This year we’re going back to the future to bring you in-person events, live and on-demand webinars, demonstrations, in-depth blog posts, and prizes! Best of all, it’s free of charge! Check the DI Month Hub for all the details and to sign up for your nearest live event.

If we go with the first option, that will create an association between the two symbols in the project. When adding the symbol and creating the association to an existing component, we can use the drop-down filter in the upper-right of the symbol property menus to quickly filter by component type and quickly find the component we are wanting to associate to.

Once the component is selected it will have the same component mark as the existing component. In the component tree we can see that in the example below. In this example, I have 2 symbols on different pages representing the same component.

The other option of creating a new component and not selecting an existing will apply a new component mark. How is this mark applied and where is the mark defined?

The component mark by default will come from the symbol properties itself. As I have pictured below, we can see how when we create a new symbol or edit an existing one, we have the opportunity to define the component mark.

When a new symbol is added to a document, it will use the component mark taken from the symbol property. It will take the root and then first available number in the root and create the mark. For example, if we have a root mark of “S” and this is the first symbol of the “S” root it would become S1. If this is the second symbol and second component, it would become S2.

There is another way the Mark can be added to new components even if the symbol Mark Root is blank as shown above as well. If the symbol does not have a defined Mark, then when a new component is added, it will take the Mark Root defined by the classification that the symbol is grouped in.

The last method for creating components marks is to define a formula. This is defined at the project level.

From the Electrical Project tab, go to Project Configuration, and then the tab for Marks. In the Mark section for components, the formula Icon on the far right will allow you to specify a different formula from the system defaults, that act as described above, or you can define your own custom formula.

To summarize, there are 4 ways that a new symbol can get its mark. First, is by selecting an existing component which will create an association and display the same mark as the existing component. Second, is to have the mark defined by the symbol. If no mark is defined in the symbol, then the symbol will take the mark defined by the classification by default. Lastly a customer Formula for component marks can be defined by the project setting.

David Foster
Sr. Application Engineer Specialist, Electrical
Computer Aided Technology

This is accomplished using the Replace data command.

The Replace data command allows the replacement of manufacturers, cable parts, symbols, as well as title blocks across your entire project. This functionality replaces all instances the replacement reflects.

For example, If you have multiple components with a particular manufacturer part and those components are represented in multiple places within your project, and you want to replace the manufacturer with another for all components, the Replace Data functionality will replace that manufacturer part information for all instances within your project.

When replacing data there are three state types the data can be in

    No change – Indicates the data has no replacement selected

Incompatible – the part selected for replacement does not match the requirements of the associated component symbol. This can be a miss-match of circuit types, the number of terminals, or the number of circuits.

   Compatible – the replacement meets all replacement requirements.

If you double-click on a State cell, this will bring up a detailed report for that component.

Symbols and title blocks include a preview of the existing and replacement selection.

You do have the ability to save a configuration file of the settings applied. This is helpful if a component is discontinued. This type of change may need to be implemented across multiple projects. Selecting the saved configuration will automatically apply the part change.

Ken Reinert
Sr. Application Engineer, Specialist Electrical
Computer Aided Technology

If you’re on 3DEXPERIENCE, you can easily integrate Altium Designer into your cloud-based product development process. The Collaborative Designer for Altium Designer, also referred to as the Altium Connector, provides an immersive environment to manage Altium Designer schematics, PCB layouts, and libraries within the 3DEXPERIENCE Platform.

It leverages the team collaboration capabilities of the 3DEXPERIENCE platform to facilitate a real time, concurrent PCB design process and library development resulting in fewer engineering changes and lower production costs. As changes are made to the schematic and layout, they can be synchronized through forward and backward annotation files accessed through shared 3DEXPERIENCE workspace folders.

This enables better control of electrical design data and flexible configuration management, and organizations and users are able to easily maintain multiple revision trees of designs.

When a schematic design is changed and checked back into the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, the layout designer is immediately notified that changes have been made to the design.

The collaboration workflow of an Altium design and the 3DEXPERIENCE platform can be seen below.

The Collaborative Designer for Altium Designer is not only limited to electrical designs but also beneficial for collaboration between mechanical designs as well. Components and PCBs have 3D models in the 3DEXPERIENCE platform. Therefore, saving an Altium design automatically creates a 3D representation of the PCB assembly. This could be extremely useful when creating a mechanical enclosure for a PCB that most likely has a unique shape.

Designers can easily create component library CAD data in Altium like symbols, footprints, and 3D models and manage them on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform. There is no need to maintain separate libraries across different Altium designs, reducing time and optimizing resources associated with library development.

Achieving centralized management of CAD and Altium files, along with real time collaboration between these data files within the 3DEXPERIENCE platform can be accomplished with ease with the Collaborative Designer for Altium Designer and solves many challenges Altium designers face today.

Jake Quintana
Application Engineer Specialist, Electrical
Computer Aided Technology

First, we will add the PCB definition to our study. In order to do this, we need to activate the “Printed Circuit Boards” command on our study tree using “customize tree.” Next, we will add the PCB definition we desire to our board. I will be using a 2S2P (2 signal 2 power) board definition included with the Electronics Cooling Module. These definitions are very specific to the board in use, so the following parameters should be defined for any custom boards.

Notice that there are thermal parameters for both the conductor and insulator of the board, as well as board thickness and total layers. These can be customized through a table for their thickness, percent coverage of conductor and number of layers.

With all the parameters entered, SOLIDWORKS Flow Simulation will now more accurately calculate heat dissipation & conduction through the board. This is a superior method to simply assuming a board is homogeneous orthotropic/isotropic.

The next part of our analysis will focus on the IC chip itself. These chips are often the premier heat generating part on any board. Without the electronics cooling module, the only way to simulate the heat they generate is by applying a volume or surface heat source. The flaw in this method is that it essentially assumes the IC chip is a single homogeneous piece of material.

The two-resistor component allows the heat generation and dissipation to be more accurately simulated. It accomplishes this by dividing the part into a case and junction. Both of these virtual “components” have their own thermal properties and thermal resistances between them. The two graphics below are located in the SOLIDWORKS Knowledge base S-064106.

Example of Case and Junction:

The graphic below shows how the two-resistor component is simulated.

The two-resistor component breaks the chip into case and junction virtual parts and assumes no heat transfer through the sides of the chip. From here, you have heat transfer calculations done at 3 interfaces:

1. Between the top face of the chip and ambient. (Or any interfacing material such as heat syncs)
2. Between the case and junction.
3. Between the junction and the board itself.

For our study, I applied a two-resistor component definition from the Flow Simulation Engineering Database that matches the size of the chip. I applied a 10W power through the chip as well.

Now for the results. See the cut plot below for overall temperatures of the board.

Notice that the heat seems to be dissipating to the sides of the board. This is mostly due to the heat that the PCB conductor busses are carrying, covered in the Previous blog post.

The steady-state temperatures of this chip are much too high for most electronics applications. Mostly due to the lack of a heat sync. We can find out how much energy is being transmitted and to where by using a “Flux Plot.” The Flux plot allows us to see how energy is being transferred from a body to its fluid or solid surroundings.

In this case, you can see that most of the heat in our board is being transferred through the board itself and only a fraction of it is being transferred through fluid convection. To draw more heat from the IC we will add a heat sync in the next blog!

Note: There are no entries for heat transfer through the conductor buses because the side walls of the chip are adiabatic.

A special output from the two-resistor component is the ability to plot the board, junction, and case temperatures separately. Below are goal plots for this board heating up for 2 minutes.

The global trends are the same, as we would expect. But the actual values are different. Most notably, the board interface is about 100 degrees cooler than the IC itself. As with any of my SIM blogs, they are not complete without a neat animation!

I hope this blog has enlightened you to some more capabilities of the SOLIDWORKS Flow Simulation Electronics Cooling Module. There is still more to see! Keep an eye open for part 3 where we will add a heat sync and start talking about heat pipes and other capabilities.

Matt Sherak
Applications Engineer, Simulation
Computer Aided Technology, LLC

On the Electrical Projects tab, click on the configuration drop-down and select Wire Styles.

Each wire style can use the same or a different formula for numbering. To choose what numbering method we want to use, we can click either “Equipotential” or “Wire: shown below. To view or modify either formula, we want to select the wire style and then go to “Properties”.

This will open up that particular wire style’s properties. We can see here there are two lines where the formula can be specified for either the equipotential or the wire number method. To view or modify one of these formulas, click on the Fx formula icon on the right.

We can see the current formula that the selected wire style is using for either method after clicking the Fx icon. The first tab shows us available pre-defined formulas that we can use. The second has recently used ones.

To create your own formula, we can take advantage of either the Variables and simple Formulas tab, or the Function tab. The more common technique to build a wire formula for your company is the Variables and simple Formulas tab. This allows you to choose variables that are linked to properties and arrange them in the order you want the information to be displayed. Anything in quotes inside a parenthesis is a text or typed value. For example, (“x”) would have the letter x displayed in the order it is called out in the formula. All other values and information can be selected from the list provided and formatted to your company or project requirement.

The function tab is similar and gives us pre-defined functions that can be used in the formula. The functions are different in that they are not linked to project data like the variables are. There are mathematical, text, or miscellaneous functions that can be used on their own or included with the variables and formulas. As you create the formula, you can click on the calculator icon to test the formula.

Once the formula you need is created, simply click on ok at the bottom right of the menu. Wire styles are stored within the project. If another user opens that project, they will see the formula for the style you have modified. Another way to share wire styles is add it to a template or share using a project macro.

David Foster
Sr. Application Engineer, Specialist Electrical
Computer Aided Technology

What is the best approach to deleting a detailed cable out of a project in SOLIDWORKS Electrical? When it comes to deleting or replacing a cable out of a project, we do have a couple options. One such option is to use the Cores Reservation tool and simply deselect the check box assigned to the cable as shown in the image below:

The Cores Reservation tool only works for single line diagrams. For scheme drawings, use the Project, Cables tool.

You can also use the delete tool to remove the cable permanently. While trying to delete a cable, that cable must not be associated to anything. If it is, use the Disassociate Wires tool and then proceed to delete the cable. The Disassociate Tool can be found within the detailed cabling area. Simply double click on a cable and the detailed cable options will appear. If you decide to quickly delete a cable and change your mind down the road, you will need to recreate the cable.

Hope this was helpful for all users that are curious about the best approach to deleting a detailed cable out of a project. If you want to learn more about SOLIDWORKS Electrical, feel free to signup for a quality training class with CATI.

Dale Rice
Sr. Application Engineer, Electrical
Computer Aided Technology

SOLIDWORKS Electrical PDM connector

It is very easy to get your SOLIDWORKS Electrical data into your SOLIDWORKS PDM Vault to gain control and use workflows for your data. The SOLIDWORKS Electrical PDM connector tool is available for use in the application.

The users of SOLIDWORKS Electrical will also see a new tab added to their ribbon menu named SOLIDWORKS PDM that will give them functions to operate with PDM.

The integration tool will be an add-in to the specified PDM vault

Configuring the PDM Connector

You can configure the SOLIDWORKS Electrical PDM connector by opening the PDM administration and logging into the vault. From here, you will go to Add-ins and right-click on the connector and select the SOLIDWORKS Electrical Integration Administration option.

The SOLIDWORKS Electrical Integration Administration window has three tabs named General settings, BOM settings, and File structure. General settings define the configuration for the most important system values and BOM settings define the settings for handling Bills Of Materials. File structure defines the configuration for file and folder names in SOLIDWORKS PDM and the mapping rules for the attributes going to PDM Variables.

When an electrical project is first checked into the PDM vault, each project book gets a folder with individual copies of each schematic. Within this folder, you will have a folder containing the project’s individual schematics in .dwg format if you so desire. A complete archive of the project is included as well as a full PDF of the design. These ensure downstream data users have clear and concise visibility of the entire Electrical project.

To find out more information on SOLIDWORKS Electrical or SOLIDWORKS PDM, reach out to your local rep or visit our website!

Corey Kubichka
CATI Electrical Product Manager
Computer Aided Technology

I am going to start with Improved navigation within electrical reports. The report outputs have been improved to include more hyperlinks. Let’s examine the same report within 2021 and 2022. The image below is from 2021

If we focus on rows 5, 16 & 17, we notice no hyperlinks (Hyperlinks are represented by blue text). This is because the manufacture part is used multiple times within the project. This was a limitation in 2021 and prior releases.

The image below is from 2022

We notice many more hyperlinks within the same report displayed in SOLIDWORKS Electrical Schematic 2022.

Within the Report management dialog, if you Right Mouse Click a component with a hyperlink, you can see all the available hyperlinks that are available.

Image below shows available hyperlinks for item 5 with a Right Mouse Click performed within the Mark column.

This improved functionality will greatly improve the navigation of your electrical project documentation. You are just a click away. How easy is that!

Not only did the SOLIDWORKS Development team improve navigation within reports, but they also added functionality to see your Break Conditions.

In the Right-Hand corner of the Report management dialog, you will see a check box for Break condition.

This displays a column showing the Breaks of your report.

Ken Reinert
Sr. Application Engineer Specialist, Electrical
Computer Aided Technology