3D CAD NEWS

Recently we started a series on RoHS (Restriction of Hazardous Substances) and its effects on producty designers in CADCAMNet (available to subscribers only or for a free month trial when you click 'subscribe') .

It is our perception that these stringent restrictions, which, while starting in the EU have already proliferated across South Korea, China, and will eventually come into effect in the US, will demand yet more of the manufacturers than the burden they already have for making safe products. But what it also brings is a position of strength for the PLM vendors. All of the major vendors have modules and applications that support RoHS activities, and for once, they all make sense to the product development process.

RoHS and WEEE (Waste Electrical & Electronic Equipment) requirements demand that certain documentation is created with each product to ensure compliance. This in itself is an exercise in paper-pushing, but one that is based on the Bill Of Materials (BOM). The BOM is also a central point of pretty much most PLM software products available today, so it is an ideal tool on which to build RoHS compliance tools.

Up until recently RoHS was regarded as a 'purchasing' problem. But indications are that the responsiblity for choosing the right materials, component parts and so on is moving upwards towards the design team. Once again, PLM tools tend towards communicating with the designers and engineers, and thus are in a perfect position to leverage their tools into this growing area. While we are already seeing major growth in PLM, Ithink the next 2 years are going to be sky-high for PLM growth, acceptance and adoption.

As Tony Affuso said in a recent interview in CADCAMNet, "PLM is not for the faint of heart." Well, neither is RoHS. Gather your strength everyone.

The Brat

[Editor's Note: We depart from our usual slightly sarcastic tone to share this interesting tidbit from Delcam. I am way behind reporting on Delcam for CADCAMNet, so consider this post one part information sharing, one part penitence. It comes to us from Delcam's gentleman/scholar Peter Dickin.]

Kairos Autonomi, a developer of retrofit kits for autonomous vehicles, is using Delcam FeatureCAM to compress the development cycle for new designs. “With FeatureCAM, we can literally go from thought to part in 20 minutes,” said Troy Takach, president and CEO of Kairos Autonomi.

Kairos is responding to a need, outlined by the US government, for one-third of all vehicles used by the military in 2015 to be autonomous, or self-driving. To accomplish this goal in that time period, most of the vehicles will have to be retrofitted, prompting Kairos to develop a kit to retrofit to existing production vehicles, such as Jeeps and Nissans. Each kit can be field-installed by a trained team in four hours or less.

“We make a lot of parts that are kind of mundane but easy to get wrong, in which case we would use up a lot of time,” explained Mr. Takach. “So we import the DXF file and the feature-recognition capability of FeatureCAM sees the features we need to produce. We really rely on FeatureCAM to keep our manufacturing time as short as possible.”

There are several types of parts common to every vehicle kit but each has unique features for that application. Kairos cannot spend a lot of time redesigning the parts, so the parametric capabilities of FeatureCAM allow variations to be made quickly.

“With FeatureCAM, we have a library of standard fixtures from which we can choose. If it takes longer than five minutes to set up a part, we need to think of it in a different way,” Mr. Takach said. “This allows us to make ten different parts in a short period of time and get them directly to assembly.” In addition, with FeatureCAM’s inversion tool, Kairos has found a way to machine parts that are larger than the mill’s work envelope: half the part is machined, then turned over and the remaining half is machined.

“FeatureCAM has a big impact on our profitability as a developer because it saves us time and helps us avoid spending too much time on non-product development activity. This means we have more resources and time to put on our main task which is development of autonomous vehicle software systems. We think of FeatureCAM as a bridge between the engineer and the mill which allows us to shorten the time frame and eliminate false steps.”

Kairos Autonomi CEO Troy Takach with the autonomous driving conversion unit.

The astute, connected and occasionally smartypants jerk Robert X. Cringely writes a weekly technology column for PBS Online. This week he turns his attention toward Adobe Systems. In the Cringerster's estimation, Autodesk can relax. Adobe's plans for world domination don't include taking over CAD. But they do include knocking off Microsoft.

Catch the whole Adobe vs. Microsoft column, "An Air of Invisibility."

Bill Gates realizes Roadrunner = Adobe.

Last week NVIDIA unveiled a new family of high performance computing (HPC) solutions that scientists, engineers, and other technical professionals will drool over. NVIDIA's Tesla line promises the power to solve previously unsolvable problems. A dedicated, high-performance Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) solution, Tesla brings supercomputing power to any workstation or server and to standard, CPU-based server clusters. (Check out this CADCAMNet article for details.)

That's all well and good, but we at 3D CAD News like to read the fine print. We noticed that the Tesla line will work with Linux and Windows XP, but not with new Windows Vista. Surely this was a product devleopment oversight; we can't imagine why a high-performance engineering and scientific solution would want to bypass Windows Vista (we say with our fingers crossed). 

Undetered by previous setbacks, Microsoft continues work on its Windows Vista-based cell phone.  

In a move that took nobody by surprise, CoCreate Software commuted the death sentence of CoCreate OneSpace Modeling Personal Edition, AKA Junior CoCreate. Instead of being executied for participating in a short-term marketing campaign, Junior will serve a life sentence of delivering history-free 3D modeling at no cost for assemblies of up to 60 parts, in English, German, Italian, and Japanese.

The clemency move was greeted by puzzled looks inside the halls of the big Four MCAD Vendors, who are still working out how to get their history untangled from their geometry without getting thrown in jail for it.

More information: http://www.cocreate.com/free

Junior CoCreate was all smiles when removed from Death Row.  

New market research says AMD's percentage of workstation sales has dropped like a rock in 2007. And reports are starting to surface that the next Intel CPU release is serious trouble for AMD. (See "Will AMD's Fastest CPU Be Obsolete Next Month?" at ZD Net.)

It wasn't very long ago people were wondering if Intel had lost the fight in workstation CPU's, given how well AMD had been doing. The lesson here is obvious: Never trust a paranoid monopolist to play dead for long.

As 2006 began, reports Jon Peddie Research, Intel's Xeon was in a tailspin, while AMD's Opteron could do no wrong. In the robust market for workstations, the roles have since reversed, with first quarter results showing Xeon has grabbed back much of the share it had lost to Opteron.

Overall, JPR says the workstation market "continues to pleasantly surprise." As expected, quarterly growth rates have subsided a bit from the 25% - 35% increases (year-to-year) JPR had seen in late '05 and early '06, but they remain strong. All told, the industry shipped 674,000 workstations in the first quarter of '07, up 15.2% over the same quarter of '06. ASPs held flat, allowing revenue to also increase a healthy 15% to around $1.7 billion.

In workstations, Opteron had been steadily draining share from Intel's Xeon, peaking at over 13% of dual-socket platforms for Windows-compatible workstations in Q2'06. But Q2'06 not only market the peak of Opteron's incursion, it marked the beginning of a significant fall. JPR reports that in Q1'07, AMD's share of the dual-socket capable segment (where Opteron was strongest) didn't simply flattten but actually dropped by over 50% year-to-year.

Table 1 Xeon vs. Opteron in market for dual-socket, Windows-compatible workstations. (Courtesy Jon Peddie Research)

"We'd expected AMD's share to moderate or level off by the time Intel improved its dual-socket Xeon platform in mid '06, but we hadn't anticipated the decline we've seen," commented analyst and JPR Workstation Report author Alex Herrera. "The extent of Intel's rebound will put that much more pressure on AMD to deliver quad-core Barcelona soon - and with better performance than Xeon."

In the overall workstation market (including higher-volume single-socket systems), AMD had risen to a peak of 3.6% in Q2'06, contracting to 2.0% in this last quarter.

Moments after this photo was taken, the rock identified itself as an Intel employee and crushed the AMD shooter.

OK, I am stretching the truth with that headline because he is not literally disappearing, but yesterday the CAD grapevine was abuzz. I had calls and text messages coming in on my Blackberry while I was driving in to work. "Tony Lockwood has quit Desktop Engineering" came in from multiple sources. Everyone was worried. Had there been a falling out? Is this bad news for that mainstay of the industry – Desktop Engineering Magazine?

Tony Lockwood is not really a hobbit,
he just plays one on this blog. 

It turns out that, no, this is not the case. Lockwood has been in his position as editor-in-chief, publisher and similar roles at DE for about 15 years. And has reached a point where he feels the need, and has the resources, to simply stop. Desktop Engineering, while missing the effect of Tony's industry knowledge and expertise, has had time to prepare and will continue in its central industry role.

"We have a whole load of new, and interesting, ventures at Desktop, many of which I have headed," said Lockwood in a call today. "These activities are interesting, have great potential and are fun to do. I simply have no 'interesting and fun' left to contribute."

Ever the planner, Lockwood says that he has now precisely mapped out a plan to be 'house-husband' and has a tightly-formed schedule of family clothes washing activities in and around watching 'The View', 'General Hospital' and 'The Young and the Restless' – at least until he feels like turning his laptop back on. He figures that when he finally gets bored enough to be watching C-SPAN, he will know that he has recovered enough to consider what to do next professionally.

Tony is by no means an outcast from Desktop Engineering, or out of the industry, except for the fact that while everyone else is running around worrying about non-history-based modeling, he will be sitting on his recliner digesting the wisdom of Dr. Phil.

Lucky Bloke.

Tony your sartorial eye and keen wit will be missed. (read his latest diatribe here: http://www.deskeng.com/Departments/Diatribes/Good-to-Grate-200705291911.html)

Here's a scoop for all you CAD news junkies. On Thursday CADCAMNet will publish an article in which it sets the record straight regarding recent reports that Dassault Systemes plans to take over the SolidWorks dealer channel. The SolidWorks dealer channel is alive and well and continues under existing management, free of imperial whim from its Paris overlords.

If you aren't already a CADCAMNet subscriber, go sign up for a free month now so you will get an email notice as soon as the article is published on Thursday.

Dassault Systemes CEO Bernard Charles, left, prepares to deliver his now-legendary head fake on alleged architect Frank Gehry. No humans were injured in the making of this photograph.