Developed by the same team that produced the IDF import functionality for SolidWorks 2005, CircuitWorks is a powerful, fully integrated bi-directional interface between SolidWorks and PCB Design systems. Running totally inside SolidWorks, CircuitWorks will read industry-standard IDF 2.0, IDF 3.0 or PADS files, and produce a SolidWorks Assembly of the PCB board fully populated with all of its components.

CircuitWorks will position component models onto the board to produce a very accurate assembly of the populated board. If a component model is not available in the part library, CircuitWorks will use the component footprint and extrude it to the given height to generate a component model for use in future. As well as producing an assembly of the board and its components, CircuitWorks also supports:

Unlike CircuitWorks Lite included with SolidWorks 2005, CircuitWorks is fully bi-directional. Assemblies can be exported from SolidWorks as IDF 2.0 or IDF 3.0 files.  This export facility allows a SolidWorks user to sketch a board outline in the context of an assembly, and export it to IDF. This is ideal when the shape and size of the board is driven by packaging constraints. Once a populated board has been brought into SolidWorks, components can be moved and an IDF file written out showing the new component positions. CircuitWorks’ powerful filtering options can help simplify the models produced in SolidWorks. It is possible to filter out components by height, type, or board side – even to save predefined filter settings.

CircuitWorks IDF has been successfully proven with various systems including:-