Customer References - Burndy Corporation

CONNECTOR MANUFACTURER CLICKS INTO HP PE/ME10 REVISION 6.0

Chances are good that many aspects of your life are connected to -- or by -- the Burndy Corp.

The Norwalk, Conn., company is a subsidiary of French multinational Framatome Connectors International (FCI). Its electronics division supplies connector systems for the telecommunications, data processing, industrial controls, instrumentation and commercial aircraft markets. Its connectors are also found in aerospace, automotive and other transportation industries.

In addition, Burndy's electrical division has supplied electrical connectors and installation tools to the utility, transmission and distribution , construction, maintenance and repair markets since its inception in 1924. The company became part of FCI in 1989. Today, thanks to the strength of Burndy and sister connector companies Jupiter, Souriau, Connectral and Daut & Reitz, FCI is a major player in the global connector market.

Keeping an edge in that competitive market is no small accomplishment. Burndy's contributions to electronic and electrical connector technology over the years are a result of its commitment to research and development. Many of the innovative solutions Burndy has developed in anticipation of and in response to connection problems have resulted in products now in the industry.

Among them: the first compression connector system for the utility and construction markets; the first all-aluminum connectors for combinations of aluminum and copper conductors; the first separable, multi-contact, high-pressure, gas-tight contact geometry for leadless integrated circuit packages, which eliminates the need for expensive gold plating; and the first board-to-board connector system designed for surface-mount technology.

"We work with many of the world's major electronics and electrical vendors developing new connectors for them," says Lawrence M. Pisani, senior mechanical designer and systems administrator for the engineering computer-aided design (CAD) network at Burndy.

"All the design work is done on CAD," he notes, adding, "We have no drafting boards whatsoever in our development research area."

The company moved to CAD in 1986 when it installed Hewlett-Packard's ME10 design and drafting system running on HP workstations.

Today, Pisani oversees a network comprised of 28 seats. Of those, 12 are HP workstations running HP's ME10; six are Sun SPARC stations running the same software, and 10 are DOS-based IBM-compatible PCs which run HP's ME10d. Pisani recently installed the newest version of ME10, called HP Precision Engineering/ME10 Revision 6.0. The new version contains enhancements that provide user assistance in design intent and in revision checking.

Burndy designers also take advantage of solid (3-D) modeling using two workstations running HP's ME30 modeling, design and drafting software.

When customers want to visualize a complex layout, "it's easier to understand if we model it," Pisani says.

Customers can view complex designs on screen, or more commonly, on printed media or with rapidly prototyped handheld models.

Many of Burndy's connector designs are repetitive; there may be many variations of a single type of connector.

"What HP's ME10 allows us to do is develop that one type," Pisani says. "Instead of having to make many drawings over and over again, we cut the process down by modifying the same drawing and saving it as another file."

The development cycle is considerably shorter these days, Pisani notes, because engineers can run HP's ME10d on their desktop PCs and develop customer sketches and design to the point of customer approval. Their sketches are immediately accessible to the designers' HP or Sun SPARC workstations which are running HP's ME10.

"There's no interpretation or translation that needs to be done between the software," Pisani says.

Burndy initially selected HP's ME10 for its CAD system because it offered good performance for price and it was easy to learn and use. Neither feature is lost on Pisani.

"Like many other manufacturing facilities, we decided that rather than buy a workstation for each engineer, it would be economically far more sensible to run HP's ME10d on the PCs that the engineers already had on their desks," Pisani recalls.

Further, he says, the software has always been easy for engineers and designers to learn and operate. The current release, he adds, is no exception.

"To this day, HP's ME10 is much easier than comparable programs to use and train people on, whether they have CAD experience or not," he says. "It takes less than a day before they're up and running, and only a little longer before they're handling our specific customized implementations."

Those customized implementations include a series of macro commands that Pisani has written. The macros are applicable to all three platforms -- HP, Sun and PCs -- so Pisani need not rewrite macros when platforms change.

The macros have helped boost productivity. Not only do they eliminate mundane or repetitious drafting tasks unique to Burndy's application, but they help users access drawings and download them to their screens.

Macro customization represents the intuitive front-end nature of ME10 6.0. The assumptive user interface provides an easier, quicker and more productive working environment for designers and engineers. Among the enhancements, Pisani says is an automatic trim and extend feature and improvements to its multiple scale and sub-parts features.

The system's intuitiveness eliminates the need for a designer to put down construction lines before drawing final geometry. ME10 now provides a constant feedback throughout the drawing creation.

It is, he says, creating geometry on the fly.

"You know exactly where you're going as you're drawing the geometry," he points out.

At the back end, automatic parameters assume constraints defined by the CAD operator.

The CAD system also helps in checking designs.

"When we design a mating connector, we can overlay the drawings to see if there are any interferences," he says. "HP's ME10 is as much a checking tool as it is a design tool."

That becomes one of the big advantages to the recently released ME10 Revision 6.0 and its revision checking feature. Engineers and drafters can modify a drawing, then save it as another file. They then can call up both drawings and overlay the old version on the new version.

"You can immediately tell on screen what has changed and what has remained the same," Pisani notes. "Everything that's identical between the two drawings is displayed in cyan, while items unique to the old drawing are displayed in green, and everything specific to the new drawing is in red."

The ability to overlay different versions of a design, then see their similarities and differences in color, has made the revision process and checking much easier and faster, Pisani reports.

He estimates the new CAD release should contribute to design process improvements and faster product turnaround.

"The more time we can trim in the development cycle, where most drawing revisions take place, the faster we can get product to the customer," he says, adding that the new release of HP's ME10 lays the groundwork for a much more automated approach to design. The software will dimension most of the drawing automatically, referencing the original design intent. These new dimensions shorten the design time by being variable.

"If you want to modify the geometry, you simply choose the dimension you want, input the new number, and the geometry will automatically update, following your original design intent," Pisani explains. "I've yet to see a feature like this in any CAD package, particularly a package in this price range. As the technology evolves, designers and engineers won't have to dimension their drawings; they'll simply draw their geometries the way they want them, and the program will automatically dimension them. What ME10 provides us with is the flexibility and productivity to get us from design to manufacturing in as short a time as possible."

Says Pisani: "We're beginning to see aspects of artificial intelligence applied to the drawing board."