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Is CAD Becoming More Portable?

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For years now I’ve been writing on the topic of CAD software running on mobile devices. As more and more of engineering and manufacturing tasks become distributed among various partners and suppliers in ever-expanding supply chains, having a way to access drawings and models on mobile devices (tablets, smartphones, etc.) has become more important.

Obstacles Abound

Critics—for myriads of technical reasons—don’t believe that mobile CAD is anything but a pipe dream of vendors looking for additional ways to deliver software as well as the potential of a new revenue stream for their products. Though most of the apps are free, as the market grows and demand increases, there is always the possibility that users will eventually be willing to pay for mobility. There are also concerns regarding security as mobile devices can’t be regulated and managed by IT in the same manner as desktop computers.

The Current State of Portable CAD

Autodesk was the first vendor to jump into the not-yet-tested waters, offering AutoCAD WS (now called AutoCAD 360), a free drawing and drafting app that enables users to view, edit and share AutoCAD drawings on the go. Available for free on both on the Apple store and Google Store, AutoCAD 360 has been downloaded five million times, though how that equates to the number of actual users is not completely clear.

Ralph Grabowski, an industry analyst, follows the portable CAD market closely and has just released his State of Portable CAD in 2013 report, featured in his weekly upFront.ezine. One of the drawbacks he sees with portable CAD—and one quickly identified with early critics—is the reality that CAD is very hardware-intensive and the portable devices don’t yet have the computing horsepower to run it effectively.

With limited RAM capacity on mobile devices, it’s difficult to cram the operating system, CAD program, and all the drawing data into .5 GB of RAM. On the graphics side is another lingering issue, as users can’t simply swap in a faster, CAD-friendly graphics board. For developers, another issue revolves around the question of how to write apps for iOS with Apple’s secrecy (most hardware specs are unknown), while writing for Android is also tricky because of device targeting.

Have no fear; the hardware problems will resolve themselves, as developers are already upping available RAM and GPU specs are on the upswing. Quad-core CPUs running at 1.5 GHz or faster are now common, while units with a whopping 8 cores of processing power and/or with speeds of over 2.5 GHz are beginning to ship.

How do vendors make money selling CAD apps?

Technical issues aside, there is also the lingering question of exactly how vendors would make money selling portable apps as nearly all of them are free, especially after Apple takes its 30% cut. So this begs the question: how do CAD vendors pay for the cost of developing apps when most of them aren’t charging for them?

There are exceptions. Autodesk is charging for its AutoCAD Pro and Pro Plus apps ($49 and $99/year respectively). IMSI/Design, developer of TurboViewer, is also charging for its higher-end TurboViewer X, TurboViewer Pro, and TurboReview ($6.99, $29.99 and $49.99, respectively) though special pricing of those packages is available.

AutoCAD 360
AutoCAD 360 is a free drawing and drafting mobile app that allows users to edit, view and share AutoCAD drawings from anywhere.

An alternative pricing model ties the mobile apps to desktop software, making the free mobile app useless unless the user is paying for the desktop version. Vendors trying out this pricing structure include Geometric, with its Glovius software, Simens PLM Software with its Solid Edge Mobile, Nemetschek Vectorworks with its Nomad software, and Vizerra with its Revizto Viewer.

The bottom line

Though some of the pricing quoted here may have changed, it’s a good landscape to view the general market for mobile CAD applications. While most vendors understand that there is a need for portable CAD, finding out how to actually make money at it in the short run might prove problematic.

We’ll certainly keep an eye on this emerging new market and hope to see progress—both on the technical side and the business side—so designers and engineers will have the CAD apps they need to become increasingly productive when they are out of the office or on the road.

Mentor Graphics Next-Generation FloTHERM

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Mentor Graphics Corp. (NASDAQ: MENT), announced its next-generation FloTHERM® product featuring a new native Windows graphical user interface (GUI) to handle pre-processing and large models with ease, targeting today’s most advanced electronic designs. The latest release continues the product line’s 25 year history of technical product innovation and was developed based on extensive user feedback.

Mentor Graphics

The new FloTHERM product was developed from user feedback via the company’s IDEAS website, soliciting requests on software enhancements and features that Mentor customers recommended and voted on as the most popular. Over 40 IDEAS requests were fulfilled, resulting in the new Windows-compliant GUI, parallel CFD solver and efficient handling of massive models for pre-processing, solving and post-processing.

“As one of the first FloTHERM users, I’ve always been happy with the speed of FloTHERM’s solver, especially when handling large models,” said Ir Clemens Lasance, Philips Research Emeritus. “Nevertheless, improvements are always welcome when we talk hours of CPU time and hence, I was pleasantly surprised when I tested this new version of FloTHERM. The scale-up that has been achieved was at least a factor of four on my computer with a dual processor, reducing the solution time from six hours to one-and-a-half for a specific project requiring two million cells.”

New FloTHERM product capabilities include:

  • The new Windows-compliant user interface can handle models with thousands of objects. A query-based search function, together with data columns integrated with the model node tree, provides critical model checking capabilities to define data, identify errors and to further enhance the FloTHERM user experience.
  • A new parallel solver provides scalability and fast performance for multi-processors. This capability was the #1 requested functionality from the Mentor customer-feedback portal, and makes this FloTHERM release on average two to three times, and up to 14 times, faster than previous versions.
  • The addition of new modeling objects to represent racks of equipment and data center cooling devices enables users to simulate and optimize everything from a chip to an entire room.
  • The transient thermostatic control modeling functionality allows model inputs to be varied in time and as a function of the temperature during a transient simulation. A key benefit from this feature is the ability to reduce component power dissipation, either the component’s own temperature, or those from external stimuli. Customers involved with thermostatic control systems, such as consumer electronics, computing and hand-held telephony and tablets find this new functionality helpful.
  • The FloTHERM product now also supports fluid-structure interaction through a mesh-based parallel code coupling interface (MpCCI) bridge developed at the Fraunhofer Institute SCAI. Now engineers can export CFD analysis data for finite element analysis (FEA) with a wide range of popular structural simulation programs thereby enabling users to conduct multi-disciplinary analyses.

“Our market-leading FloTHERM technology was established 25 years ago and clearly demonstrates our ongoing commitment to customers by continuing to innovate and provide solutions that they need and want,” stated Roland Feldhinkel, product line director, Mentor Graphics Mechanical Analysis Division. “By providing an intuitive Windows-based GUI and advanced features, we are delivering a dynamic solution that will increase user productivity and enable the development of innovative products. This is truly the next generation of the world’s most popular electronics cooling solution.”

Mentor Graphics
www.mentor.com

Maple IDE dramatically reduces development time

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Maplesoft announced a new member of the Maple product family, the Maple IDE.  The Maple IDE, powered by DigiArea, Inc., is an integrated development environment for the Maple programming language that improves productivity by providing advanced tools for writing and managing Maple projects.  The Maple IDE, which is based on the Eclipse platform, offers a customized industry-standard environment for medium- to large-scale Maple development projects.

The Maple language provides built-in knowledge of mathematical data structures and concepts, support for writing multi-threaded, parallel programs as well as a very rich library of existing commands and algorithms. Over 90 percent of the algorithms built into Maple have been implemented using the Maple programming language. This same language is available to any Maple user for writing scripts, implementing new algorithms and extending the Maple system.  The Maple IDE makes it dramatically easier for Maple users to create, manage, and update libraries of Maple code.

Features of the Maple IDE include the ability to quickly browse and search through source hierarchies, automatic highlighting and formatting based on syntactic and semantic properties of the code, navigation, testing and much more.  The Maple IDE assists developers in writing, updating, maintaining, and understanding code, so projects can be completed faster with fewer errors, and later enhancements can be made more easily.

Maplesoft
www.maplesoft.com

NVIDIA Kepler GPUs are finally here

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nvidia-quadro-keplerIt’s taken awhile, but the new generation of NVIDIA GPU graphics cards are out.

Why does it matter? Well, short of performance issues—and these cards are fast indeed—the Kepler GPU represents a product inflection point for NVIDIA. It’s the “new model” – the presumptive choice among NVIDIA graphics cards for CAD workstations.

Up until now, NVIDIA has been shipping justs a few models of Kepler-based cards. The Lenovo W530 notebook that I’m using to write this post has a Quadro K2000M (the “K” means Kepler, the “M” means mobile), which is their fastest card for 15” class mobile workstations. The high-end K5000 has been out since October.

Here’s a table, listing the range of Kepler-based cards for desktop workstations:

QUADRO
KELPER DESKTOP WORKSTATION SPECIFICATIONS
BOARD FEATURES K5000 K4000 K2000 K2000D K600
Memory
Size		 4GB
GDDR5		 3GB
GDDR5		 2GB
GDDR5		 2GB
GDDR5		 1GB
DDR3
Max
Power		 122W 80W 51W 51W 41W
Power
Connector		 1x
6-pin		 1x
6-pin
Number
of slots		 2 1 1 1 1
Simultaneous
Displays		 4 4 4 4 2
Display
Connectors		 DVI-I
(1)DVI-D (1)

DP 1.2 (2)

 DVI-I
(1)DP 1.2 (2)		 DVI-I
(1)DP 1.2 (2)		 DVI-I
(1)DVI-D (1)

mDP 1.2 (1)

 DVI-I
(1)DP 1.2 (1)
Single
Precision Performance (GFLOPS)		 2168 1244 732 732 336
Price
(MSRP)		 $2,249.00 $1,269.00 $599.00 $599.00 $199.00

You probably want to know which card you should choose, don’t you?

Let me tell you about the extensive comparative benchmark test I ran on the full line of NVIDIA cards. Or not. Instead, of doing that, I called my old friend David Cohn, and asked him what he thought. David regularly does full-on tests and reviews of graphics cards. For example, he reviewed the Quadro K5000 in the January issue of Desktop Engineering, and was duly impressed. Even though it’s the top of the Kepler line, it provides a lot of bang for the buck.

His observations confirmed my experience, which is that most CAD users should choose the mid-range card. In this case, the K2000 (or the K2000D, which comes with different display connectors.)

While the K600 is a perfectly competent card, it is noticeably less responsive in run-of-the-mill CAD use than the K2000. The difference in performance is more than worth the $400 difference in price.

And, while both the K4000 and K5000 are smoking hot cards, you only experience their power when running visualization type applications. The simple shaded models used in day-to-day CAD work just don’t require the capabilities of a high-end GPU.

Of course, all this is a big fat generalization. There are plenty of exceptions—cases where software developers have specifically tuned applications to use GPUs to their full potential.

Here’s how I’d put it: If I were to get a phone call from the brother-in-law of a friend, and he wanted to know what GPU card to buy for his CAD system, I’d tell him to get a  K2000. But, between you and me, when it comes to which card I’d get for my own workstation, the answer is different.  I choose the K5000.  I’ll tell you why in an upcoming post.

NVIDIA www.nvidia.com

Geomagic acquires Sensable. 3D just got even cooler.

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CAD isn’t the only way to create 3D models. More and more, 3D models start out as 3D scans of real objects. Geomagic has been a leader in software to convert 3D scanned data into useable 3D models. Their software is used widely used for design, reverse engineering and inspection.

Last week, Geomagic acquired Sensable’s 3D design and haptics businesses. Sensable is best known for two things: Their force-feedback haptic input devices, and their voxel-based organic shape modeling software.

The combination of Geomagic and Sensable makes a lot of sense, from a business and technical perspective. And, admittedly, the combination has a high cool factor.  Check out this video showing how the Sensable Phantom works:

www.geomagic.com

Hot rod engineering workstations

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When I was barely a teenager, in the early ’70s. I became interested in car magazines. In the back of some of those magazines, I’d often see ads for a company called Baldwin/Motion Performance. They sold brand new hot-rodded Camaros that were guaranteed to run 11.50 second or faster quarter miles at the drag strip. Baldwin/Motion Performance Camaros represented the epitome of tuner-built hot rods. They were fast enough that, according to Super Chevy magazine, you could buy one, and, with no further tuning, win the A/MP class at the Winternationals.

During the same period, other companies also sold fast Camaros. Though GM’s official policy in the late 60’s and early 70’s was that they didn’t support drag racing, there was a way to get nearly drag-ready cars, if you knew the trick. A few dealers, notably Yenko Chevrolet, managed to get Chevrolet to install Corvette 427ci L-72 engines in Camaros, through the “central office purchase order” process. These factory hot rod COPO Camaros came with a full factory warranty. Nearly perfect examples have sold for over $2.2 million USD at auction.

Muscle cars have little to do with CAD, but I was reminded of these cars, at least by analogy, when I was at the SolidWorks World 2012 show, in San Diego, last week.

While there, I attended a press conference announcing HP’s new Z1 engineering workstation. This machine is sort of analogous to a factory hot rod. It comes with a stunning 27” built in display, a quad-core Intel Xeon processor, NVIDIA Quadro graphics, and uses ECC (error correction code) memory—which is particularly desirable for critical engineering software applications (See Wikipedia’s entry on ECC memory for background on this.)

There’s no doubt that the Z1 costs more than a typical commodity PC. But, for people doing serious CAD, CAE, or CAM work, the performance and reliability the system offers is worth the premium.

While at SolidWorks World, I also had a chance to chat with Rick Krause, CEO of BOXX Technologies. BOXX makes what could be considered the equivalent of a tuner-built hot rod. Their 3DBOXX 3970 XTREME workstation is designed to provide the best performance possible for serious 3D CAD work. That is, it’s performance isn’t tuned for doing spreadsheets and web browsing (which benefit from multiple core processors), it’s tuned for doing serious CAD work (which requires fewer, but faster cores.)

Let’s go back to the car analogy: Yenko Chevrolet sold stock Camaros, with the biggest and best engines GM offered. Baldwin Chevrolet sold hot-rodded Camaros, also with the biggest and best engines GM offered, but tuned to put out over 500+ horsepower (while still being streetable.)

The HP Z1 engineering workstations use Intel’s biggest and best processors. The BOXX XTREME workstations also use Intel’s biggest and best processors – tuned (overclocked) for the most horsepower.

BOXX doesn’t really like to use the work “overclock,” because it implies that they’re pushing the processor past it’s design spec. BOXX works closely with Intel, to make sure they stay within the processor design specs. Since they use liquid-cooling, they can push the processor faster, without reliability problems. Their workstations are backed-up by a 3 year warranty, and, in their history of selling overclocked systems, they’ve never experienced a processor failure.

If you’re a serious CAD, CAE, or CAM user, and you can out-run your current computer, you need to take a serious look at getting a factory-built or tuner-built hot rod computer.

HP Z1 Workstation

BOXX Technologies 3DBOXX 3970 XTREME Workstation

 Photo courtesy Baldwin-Motion

 

Should you buy an expensive graphics card?

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You already know the answer to this question. If you’re perfectly happy with the graphics performance of your CAD system, then the answer is “no.” If you’d like faster, smoother, or more realistic graphics on your system, then the answer is “yes.”

The term “expensive graphics card” might be troubling to GPU suppliers such as Nvidia and AMD. Yet, it is probably more accurate than, for example, “high-performance graphics card.” For many years, all graphics subsystems used in CAD capable computers (whether built-in, or on an add-in card) have been relatively high-performance. When comparing entry-level with top-of-the-line graphics, the most stark difference is price: free (something that comes with the computer), versus not-free (something you need to pay extra for.)

It’s only after you’ve come to the conclusion that it’s worth paying that extra that you need to start digging into the question: How much extra?

The practical differences between $100 graphics cards and $2000 graphics cards are not all that obvious to the uninitiated. There is no simple number-of-merit on a specification sheet that will tell you how good a graphics card is. To choose well, you need to start by doing a little homework.

A good starting point is AMD’s ebook, Simplifying the World of Professional Graphics. It’s well worth the read, even if you’re already reasonably knowledgeable about graphics hardware.

getReal3D for Unity released

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Mechdyne released getReal3D for Unity, a software plug-in to the Unity toolkit that brings 3D and viewer-based perspective to a variety of immersive 3D displays.

According to the company, getReal3D brings a greater sense of immersion to Unity applications for training and simulations. By integrating with head and hand tracking devices, the software provides more intuitive interaction with data and models. Combined with large screen displays and viewer-centered perspective, users are able to walk in and around 3D objects, extending the realism of a wide variety of situational simulations that require a perception of presence and life-size scale.

The product allows developers to focus on the content rather than the display platform. Its simple plug-in library manages all of the configuration information of the display system external of the application. A single executable is capable of running on many types of displays without the developer ever needing to know the specific details of the display system.

getReal3D is available worldwide. For more information, go to www.mechdyne.com/getreal3d.aspx.

Mechdyne

www.mechdyne.com

Power supply circuit design

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It is becoming increasingly easier to design circuit boards thanks to software and hardware tools from integrate circuit (IT) manufacturers. Texas Instrument (TI), for instance, offers evaluation modules (EVM), a software design evaluation program called SwitcherPro, and SPICE software circuit simulation program TINA-TI for numerous power supply chips. You can use these tools to evaluate and experiment with the power supply product of interest and design a successful power supply solution.

EVAs are extensive printed-circuit board (PCB) networks that contain various TI chips. User guides describe the PCB set-up in relation to the particular board. The user guide describes the characteristics, operation, and EVM-user specifics.

The SwitcherPro evaluation tool helps you design power supplies specific to TI’s controllers, low-power DC/DC converters, and SWIFT point-of-load (POL) step-down DC/DC products. This software creates and manages your design with various internal tools and results. Design data such as efficiency curves and stability loop curves are available with this product.

The SwitcherPro has EVM designs embedded within the software offering circuit diagram suggestions for all power supply designs. The circuit diagrams show you the resistive, inductive, and capacitive elements surrounding the converter along with suggested values.

TINA-TI is a circuit simulation tool based on a SPICE engine. This circuit simulation engine provides DC, transient, and frequency domain analysis of SPICE circuits. TINA also has a post-processing capability that allows you to customize the format of the results.

To complete the design cycle, go back to the evaluation module, change the values as suggested by SwitcherPro, verify by using TINA-TI simulations, and test the new circuit on the EVM.

This post was written by Bonnie C. Baker, Signal Integrity Engineer at Texas Instrument

Texas Instruments

www.ti.com

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