Expedition to SolidWorks

In electronics design, it is often desirable for the mechanical engineers to be able to see the surface copper layers of a PCB. There are existing tools that create the board part and components from the ECAD data, but no clean way to get the copper features from a Mentor Graphics Expedition PCB database to some kind of part file in SolidWorks. I have been working on such a method for some time, and have developed this software that does not rely on any interchange file, but goes directly from the Expedition shape entities to a sketch in SolidWorks, and then to extruded and cut features. The resultant part can now be placed in an existing SolidWorks assembly file with the board part and all its components.

See additional comments below.

[Patrick_Cashman]

Since doing this a couple of years ago, I came  up with a much faster method that works even better.  A dxf file is create from the design data in Mentor Graphics.  The dxf file is then used to create a SolidWorks part file with just one feature, which has all the copper objects on a given board layer in it.  It's working very well and the ME's love being able to import the copper part files into their mechanical models to see what the board copper looks like in their design.