KUALA LUMPUR: Computer-aided design (CAD) will never be the same again thanks to synchronous technology, said German semiconductor heavyweight Siemens Inc.

It claimed that synchronous technology — managed by its product lifecycle management arm Siemens PLM — can tremendously reduce the time it takes to design and redesign a prototype.

Siemens Asia-Pacific product marketing director Dieter Klinke said market response to synchronous technology is expected to be good, especially in today’s environment where a new product is released every six months on average.

“This is why companies need a technology that will be able to (help) bring new products to market quickly,” he said at a press briefing in Kuala Lumpur recently.

The idea for the technology, Klinke said, came out of a discussion with Siemen’s PLM customers and many thought that something had to be done to help them cope with constant design changes.

“Synchoronous technology enables the user to change various components in a design simultaneously,” he said.

In the past, Klinke said, designers took a lot of time with design changes because they needed to study how even a small change would affect the efficiency of a product.

Synchronous technology, he said, shows the designer immediately how a small change would affect a product and suggests the changes that need to be made to other components of the product to make it work better.

“We believe the technology will simplify the designer’s job of adding changes to a design because he receives immediate feedback on his creation from the technology,” Klinke said.

Siemens’ synchonous technology can be found in the latest version of its CAD software, NX6.

According to Siemens PLM, the latest version of NX features Design Freedom — a feature which combines synchronous technology with existing NX capabilities so that data does not have to be rebuilt should any changes be necessary.

The feature also helps in simulation exercises to enable rapid evaluation of design modifications based on geometry from any CAD system.

It also combines unique 3D geometry editing, automated abstraction, and finite element (FE) meshing tools.

These new capabilities enable engineers to integrate simulation modelling efforts sent in by different teams in the product design process.

Klinke said NX6 can be used by designers regardless of skill levels and industries. The new CAD software can also work with older versions of NX. “Designers can even open up their old designs and modify them using NX6,” he added.

NX6 can be downloaded from http://support.ugs.com/. For more information on synchronous technology and NX6, go to www.siemens.com/nx.