This article highlights that electrical and mechanical engineers work together on products like cell phones; on the contrary, their software programs do not work like this anymore. Like cellular telephones and computers, all products made up of a combination of printed circuit boards and shaped materials like plastics require a rather tight degree of cooperation among mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, and finite element analysts. But today’s computer-aided design and finite element analysis technology is not advanced enough to let them work as skillfully together as they might. Engineers and analysts still need to translate their designs into a neutral file format in order to pass files between their different software systems, and much can be lost in translation. But a number of engineering software developers are refining products to break down some of those barriers. Electrical and mechanical engineers commonly use the software to work together on projects like the design of fan-cooled computer central processing units and how they are anchored using already-specified techniques that the mechanical engineer has programmed into the system.

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