Novedge Pulse™ of Kenneth Wong

No longer considered mainly a utilitarian device, consumers are actively engaged in a love affair with their electronics gear, upping the ante for product development teams now tasked with creating seductive designs on top of the traditional engineering challenges. Call that an opening for Dassault Systemes, which is aggressively trying to promote its wide and [more...]

Perhaps it’s no coincidence that Novedge was founded on April Fool’s Day, 2003. The company’s cofounders Franco Folini and Cristiano Sacchi believed what many once thought was a joke — selling professional 3D design software the way Amazon.com sells books and CDs. “To launch a new enterprise you need to be a bit of a [more...]

Siemens PLM Software is offering CAD, CAM, and CAE training — courses that usually cost as much as $17,000 — to recently returning veterans for free. In an announcement today, the company outlines the program: “Ten, multi-day courses are offered, including comprehensive training on NX software, Siemens PLM Software’s leading integrated solution for CAD/CAM/CAE [more...]

Are CAD jockeys just that—folks who are adeptly skilled at working the CAD tools to do surface modeling and other complex tasks—or are they engineering wizards simply employing a tool to get the job done? The question of whether the “D” in CAD is more about enabling good drafting or good design is the subject [more...]

Grabcad, cofounded by Hardi Meybaum, is best known as an online community, a popular destination for like-minded designers and engineers to share their models and collect feedback. With an emphasis on friendship and professional networking, Grabcad has so far been more social than commercial. But that’s about to change. Grabcad’s new product Workbench [more...]

Kubotek‘s viewing and markup program, KeyView, has been selling in Europe for some time. This week, the company decided the time has come to roll it out in the U.S. So it is releasing the product under a new name, KeyMarkUp. (The name change is understandable, as some trademarked products already exist under the name [more...]

Injection molding is fluid flow simulation of a different kind. It’s generally lumped together with computer-aided engineering (CAE), but it’s too specialized to fit into computational fluid dynamics (CFD). So tailor-made software like Moldflow, Moldex3D, and Simpoe emerged to fill the gap. (Come to think of it, mold simulation is the study of filling gaps [more...]

“Workstation performance for about the price of a desktop” — That’s how Dell pitches its new entry-level workstation T1700. The new unit is available in small form factor and mini-tower configurations. They’ll be powered by Intel Xeon processor E3-1200 v3, based on Intel’s next-generation Haswell architecture. The chip maker is heavily promoting Haswell as the [more...]

It’s no secret that Autodesk has staked its bet on the cloud as a key differentiator for its PLM 360 offering. Now the company is touting a partnership with ERP cloud provider NetSuite Inc., making closed-loop integration with ERP another ace in its quest to build out a winning PLM hand. The pair is promising [more...]

It’s no surprise that the winner of the $1 million prize in DARPA’s Fast Adaptable Next-Generation Ground Vehicle (FANG) mobility/drivetrain challenge was a three-person team with members dispersed in Ohio, Texas, and California. The challenge, the first of which kicked off in January, aims to spark innovation around the design of the vehicle, not only [more...]

FE-DESIGN GmbH, a German company with a product line named after a famous Italian opera, is going to become part of Dassault Systemes (DS), a French 3D software giant. Today, in a transaction of undisclosed amount, DS acquired the Germany software maker know for its optimization packages: TOSCA Fluid and TOSCA Structure. DS already [more...]

SmartGeometry (SG), the annual conference hosted by Bentley Systems, is now in its 12th year, with a solid history to prove its international appeal. But even long-time SG alumni are often at a loss for words when pressed to describe the event. “What is SmartGeometry? I don’t actually have a straight answer to that. It’s [more...]

As part of Expedition 17, NASA astronaut Gregory Chamitoff once spent 198 days in space. That was in 2008. Next week, Chamitoff is scheduled to land in Irvine, California, as one of the keynote speakers at MSC Software‘s annual user conference. Shamitoff’s keynote will be followed by Dominic Gallello, MSC Software’s president and CEO, who plans [more...]

Setting up simulation jobs that accurately reproduce real-world phenomenons — how an engine heats up during operation or how fluid flows inside a catheter — takes skill and experience. So is interpreting the FEA (finite element analysis) results. The second phase is crucial in making intelligent deductions about how to improve the design. About a [more...]

Astrobotic, a Pittsburgh-based space robotic technology developer, is currently one of the teams competing for the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize. To win, Astrobotic and roughly 20 other teams are racing against one another — and against time — to be the first “to safely land a robot on the surface of the [more...]

This is a new kind of hand-to-hand combat. Here, size doesn’t matter. In this arena, a geeky software engineer has just as much a chance of landing a crippling blow as a hurdle-jumping Olympian, and a video game player can be just as lethal as a National Guard veteran or a professional Muay Thai fighter [more...]

Those engineers chalking up the cloud to be a passing fancy or a platform that’s ill-suited for professional-class design tools might want to reconsider. In yet another example of a full-function engineering tool making its way to the latest software delivery model, startup Lagoa has just released a full 3D rendering and collaboration platform, entirely [more...]

Recent mergers and acquisitions in the simulation market reveal a growing appetite for composite expertise. The explanation is simple (and it’s going to sound like a pitch from a diet program): by gobbling up composite content, you can master the art of weight loss. In aerospace and automotive, manufacturers aggressively pursue weight reduction because lighter [more...]

Eighteen years after its launch in 1995, DE, is revising its brand to reflect the changing climate of engineering. Today, the magazine announces it’s changing its name from Desktop Engineering to Democracy Everywhere. The change is reflected in the magazine’s new logo that incorporates a ballot box. The magazine’s cofounders decided to keep the new [more...]

Take a gander at the bill of materials of many cars, planes, even sporting goods equipment and it’s no surprise that any company aiming to be a serious player in simulation needs to add a composite tool to their CAE mix. Dassault Systems offers composite simulation as part of its CATIA 3D Experience platform, and [more...]

Mountain climbers know Piz Daint, measuring 9,700 feet, as part of Switzerland’s snow-dusted Ortler Alps. Researchers and supercomputer nerds, however, know another Piz Daint, installed inside the Swiss National Supercomputing Center (abbreviated as CSCS in Swiss). The center is a unit of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, where Albert Einstein once studied [more...]

Mentor Graphics has combined the electronics cooling DNA from its FloTHERM thermal analysis software with the concurrent CFD technology at the heart of its FloEFD product to deliver a new solution to let engineers work seamlessly with geometry created in both the mechanical CAD and EDA space. Called FloTHERM XT, the software is designed to [more...]

To say that Ted Wertheimer from MSC Software works closely with developers from NVIDIA is to state a literal fact. As director of product development, he works from MSC Software’s northern California office in Sunnyvale, about two miles down the street from NVIDIA headquarter. The traffic between MSC Software and NVIDIA flows both ways, Wertheimer [more...]

In yet another example of gaming’s influence on professional development tools, Gumstix Inc., a maker of Linux computers-on-modules (COMs) for electronics manufacturers, has created an online platform that brings drag-and-drop simplicity to the design of custom embedded computers. Called Geppetto, the system is aimed at manufacturers who want an embedded device tailored to their specifications [more...]

Erwin Schnell from Gruner AG remembered attending one of the earliest European user conferences held by CD-adapco in the 1990s. He flew into London to meet roughly 40 fellow software users, hosted by about 10-15 CD-adapco staff members. This year, when he returns to the conference, now called STAR Global (Orlando, Florida, March 18-20), he’ll [more...]

Space, the final frontier, is no longer restricted to NASA and government agencies. It’s now open to private citizens and companies, spurred by incentives like the Google Lunar X Prize. So it wouldn’t be far-fetched to imagine an open-source rocket engine printed in a 3D printer in the near future, right? Make that future today [more...]

What would a version of Dropbox customized for CAD users be like? It would probably look like MyCadbox, a cloud-hosted virtual storage space for STEP files. The online product comes from the same company that developed and released CadFaster, a viewing and markup program for CAD users. Like CadFaster, MyCadbox is three complementary offerings — [more...]

Altair Engineering, best known for its simulation software, is rolling out a major release of its flagship suite, HyperWorks. The comprehensive lineup covers every phase of design development and testing, from computational fluid dynamics (CFD, with AcuSolve), crash analysis (HyperCrash), sheet metal form (HyperForm), and meshing (HyperMesh), to structural analysis (OptiStruct), and more. The latest [more...]

DE‘s contributing editor Tony Abbey, a recognized finite element analysis (FEA) trainer in NAFEM‘s classrooms and online courses, is planning to field your questions in a webinar titled “FEA for Managers & Reviewers: Ask Tony” (March 7). So I took advantage of our editorial affiliation to toss him a question that’s been on my mind [more...]

One of the greatest barriers to Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) adoption has been complexity. Not just complexity in how to best leverage the software for real business advantage, but also in how to address the challenging IT support aspects related to the platform, including how to effectively deploy and configure the software to work within [more...]

Matthew Gueller, senior surface designer for Harley-Davidson Motor Company,chuckled when I asked him if he does rendering, as if to say, “Do you even need to ask?” Being a professional visualization artist, Matthew sees a large chunk of his time consumed by rendering. “Some of the images we have to render — they’re one-to-one ratio, at [more...]

Most designers and engineers today don’t think twice about running basic stress analysis on their CAD models. Mainstream mechanical design software programs — Autodesk Inventor, SolidWorks, Solid Edge, and PTC Creo, to name but a few — offer integrated stress analysis, often at no additional cost. What was once considered specialists’ domain is now second [more...]

On a bright sunny Friday, I ventured out to San Francisco’s South of Market District (SOMA), to locate the office of Rescale in the cluster of start-ups that dot the neighborhood. Somewhere between GreenCitizen Inc. and Kate O’Briens Irish pub, I found the buzzer to Rescale’s door. Sunny Manivannan, Rescale’s VP of business development, popped [more...]

Consider the recent headlines regarding battery problems with the now-grounded and once highly lauded Boeing 787 Dreamliner aircraft, and it’s not hard to see why engineering and manufacturing executives lose lots of sleep over quality issues and why formal quality management programs are so crucial to a product’s ultimate success. With that in mind, Siemens [more...]