Shulou(Shulou.com)06/02 Report--

With the acceleration of the transformation and upgrading of China's manufacturing industry, computer-aided innovation technology is being widely used in the R & D process of industrial product design. CAX R & D software represented by computer-aided Design (CAD), Engineering Analysis, Simulation and Verification (CAE), Electronic Design Automation (EDA) and computer-aided process Planning (CAPP) has become an indispensable and important R & D tool for advanced manufacturing and related research institutes and design units.

In the process of using these R & D tools and software, enterprises will inevitably encounter problems and challenges of hardware matching, data storage and even management mechanism. we can analyze the development characteristics of industrial R & D computing one by one from the perspective of the evolution of software, hardware and computing patterns.

There are many kinds of industrial R & D computing software, which are more influential and have a wide range of applications, such as CAD, CAE, EDA and so on. We can collectively refer to them as CAX R & D software. the following space briefly describes the main features of these software and the representative manufacturers:

CAD

CAD refers to the general name that engineers and technicians use computers as tools and use their own knowledge and experience to design products or projects, such as scheme conception, overall design, engineering analysis, graphic editing and technical document arrangement. It is a new technology with comprehensive application of multi-disciplines. CAD uses computer system to assist designers to complete the whole process of design, organically combines the massive data storage and high-speed data processing ability of computer with people's creative thinking and comprehensive analysis ability, gives full play to their respective strengths, and enables designers to get rid of heavy calculation and drawing work, so as to achieve the best design effect. CAD plays an important role in accelerating the development of engineering and products, shortening the design and manufacturing cycle, improving quality, reducing costs, and enhancing the innovation ability of enterprises.

The commonly used foreign CAD software are AutoCAD of Autodesk company, Catia of Inventor,Dassault company, UG of Solidworks,Siemens company, Creo of Solidedge,PTC company (upgrade version of Pro/ENGINEER) and so on; domestic CAD software has digital generous CAXA, CAD/3D, Kaimu CAD and so on.

Because the target field of generalized CAD is the high integration of CAD/CAE/CAPP/CAM, CAD software companies unanimously extend the product line to the field of PDM/PLM, hoping to make use of process system constraints, management and even cooperate with relevant software tools and data, but the CAD data structures of different software vendors are always incompatible, and the data-level coupling between different systems is difficult to achieve.

CAE

CAE (Computer Aided Engineering) refers to the analysis and calculation, analysis and simulation and structural optimization in engineering design. CAE is a branch from CAD, started a little later, and its theory and algorithm have experienced a process from vigorous development to increasingly mature. With the continuous development of computer technology, the function and calculation accuracy of CAE system have been greatly improved. Various CAE systems based on product digital modeling emerge as the times require, and have become an indispensable numerical calculation tool in engineering and product structure analysis, verification and structure optimization. The combination of CAE technology and CAD technology is getting closer and closer. In product design, designers can achieve interactive design if they can integrate CAD and CAE technology well, so as to ensure that the enterprise can achieve the best benefit from the production design link. Analysis is the foundation of design, and the integration of design and analysis is an inevitable trend.

At present, CAE technology has been widely used in national defense, aerospace, machinery manufacturing, automobile manufacturing and other industrial fields. As a right-hand man and effective tool for designers to improve the ability of engineering innovation and product innovation, CAE technology can quickly analyze the performance and reliability of innovative design schemes, carry out virtual operation simulation, find design defects as early as possible, and achieve optimal design. At the same time of innovation, improve design quality, reduce research and development costs, and shorten the research and development cycle.

The more famous CAE software are Nastran of MSC company, ANSYS of Marc,Ansys company, FLUENT of ANSOFT,Dassault company, NX.Nastran, LMS, STAR-CCM+ of SIMULIA,Siemens company of ANSOFT,Dassault company, etc. Foreign manufacturers occupy the mainstream position. In recent years, there has been an upsurge of CAD software manufacturers buying CAE software across the board, and at the same time, it also verifies the development trend of generalized CAD.

The foundation of CAE software in China is weak, and there are no influential CAE software companies, but FEPG of Institute of Mathematics of Chinese Academy of Sciences, KMAS of Jilin University and JIFEX of Dalian University of Technology are all striving to become independent and controllable CAE software in China. In addition, some domestic commercial companies are exploring the innovation of CAE online analysis service mode based on CalculiX, OpenFOAM and other open source software. There are also research institutions represented by Beijing Computing Center to provide simplified and templated industry CAE analysis services based on the core of commercial CAE solver, which has obvious value of low investment and quick results for R & D and innovation of small and medium-sized enterprises.

EDA

EDA is the abbreviation of Electronic Design Automation (Electronic Design Automation). It developed from the concepts of computer-aided Design (CAD), computer-aided Manufacturing (CAM), computer-aided testing (CAT) and computer-aided Engineering (CAE) in the mid-1960s.

EDA technology takes the computer as a tool. On the EDA software platform, the designer uses the hardware description language VHDL to complete the design file, and then the computer automatically completes the logic compilation, simplification, segmentation, synthesis, optimization, layout, wiring and simulation, until the adaptive compilation, logic mapping and programming download for the specific target chip. The emergence of EDA technology greatly improves the efficiency and maneuverability of circuit design, and reduces the labor intensity of designers.

According to the application scene, EDA software can be divided into electronic circuit design and simulation tools, PCB design software, IC design software, PLD design tools, etc. Electronic circuit design and simulation tools include SPICE/PSPICE, multiSIM7, Matlab, SystemView, MMICAD LiveWire, Edison, Tina Pro Bright Spark and so on. PCB design software includes Protel, Altium Designer, OrCAD, Viewlogic, PowerPCB, Cadence PSD, Expedition PCB, Zuken CadStart and so on. IC design software mainly comes from Cadence, Mentor Graphics and Synopsys. PLD design software manufacturers mainly include ALTERA, XILINX, Altium and so on.

At present, there are few domestic EDA software R & D manufacturers, Huada Jiutian, Qingyue Software and other enterprises are carrying out some very valuable explorations and attempts.

If we take a closer look at the characteristics of these CAX development software, we can find at least the following common characteristics:

1) the unit price of authorization is expensive

Most CAX software supports local area network floating license for users or concurrent authorization, the unit price is more expensive, and few domestic enterprise users have the financial strength to purchase software adequately.

2) strict hardware requirements

The hardware requirements of industrial R & D software are mainly reflected in CPU processing ability, real-time rendering ability of graphics card, memory cache ability and mass storage capacity, which are quite different from those of common office software. therefore, the IT departments of domestic enterprises generally feel a headache for the matching construction of CAX software.

3) unstructured data

CAX software produces a large number of images, grids, documents and other files, which is difficult to use traditional structured database technology for archiving and management. the management requirements for the storage, retrieval, distribution and recovery of these massive unstructured data have always been the focus of the industry.

4) stand-alone interaction mode

Thanks to the widespread application of PC, CAX software gradually occupies the desktop of R & D designers, and engineers have become accustomed to the interactive experience of PC, but the backward performance of PC, decentralized production of data and safety control have gradually become work bottlenecks, and the contradiction between application and management has gradually emerged.

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