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 THE STAT 26Percentage of wireless customers who use their cell phones to take picturesMore Vitals
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JULY 16, 2002 SPECIAL REPORT: ENGINEERING'S DIGITAL ERA A Whole New World of 3-D Design Powerful yet cheap PCs and amazingly sophisticated software are transforming how things get made. No industry is being left untouched
That's nothing compared with what he plans for his next trick. Later this year, Hawkes expects to roll out a production model of the Deep Flight Aviator. Billed as the first "hydrobatic" submersible craft, the two-passenger sub will have acrobatic steering capability more akin to fixed-wing airplanes than to the clunky mechanisms used to guide conventional submarines. A revolutionary internal pressure bubble shaped like a cocoon will allow passengers to lie comfortably recumbent as they prowl through depths down to 1,500 feet. Resembling a fighter jet complete with front and back wings, the Aviator will be agile enough to zip through narrow canyons and fast enough to keep up with the fleetest sea life. Hawkes hopes his craft will create a new pasttime -- subsea flight. In fact, he's already enrolling thrill seekers and those who aspire to be subsea pilots in a $15,000 flight school course slated to start operations off the Bahamas this fall. KEY ENABLER. While the curiousity and creativity of Hawkes and his engineers played a role in developing this eye-popping craft, Hawkes gives much of the credit to an unlikely source -- a three-dimensional design and engineering program called Inventor published by software company Autodesk (ADSK ). The software allowed Hawkes to create and manipulate flowing shapes in an easy graphical interface. True, Autodesk runs HOT's Web site (www.deepflight.com) and sponsors some of his research. But Hawkes says he would buy the stuff anyway. Inventor, he adds, was a key enabler in designing the bent aircraft-fighter-shaped aluminum hull, which allowed him to break away from traditional bulbous designs for heavier spherical hulls. Hawkes was able to play with virtual shapes, test their stress points, and refine them without ever touching a lathe or a mold. The software has also allowed Hawkes to streamline his engineering staff from 10 to 3 while still turning out a comparable number of designs. "It has cut our design costs by one-third. And we have literally bypassed the prototype stage. Our products have gone straight into service. That's quite extraordinary," Hawkes says. SHARED IMAGES. Talk to engineers across the economic spectrum, from architects and airplane designers to carmakers and silicon-circuit gurus, and they'll sing the same song. Over the past decade, the declining cost of faster computers and vastly improved software from Autodesk, Dassault, Electronic Data Systems, and PTC, among others, have taken digitized engineering and design to new heights. The byproduct of this transformation is a fundamental alteration in the way an important chunk of mankind makes things. Engineers can now readily share early prototype images with marketers, investors, and collaborators around the globe. Computer-assisted design (CAD) programs have eliminated many expensive design steps and shrunk time to market by 50% or more in many fields. On factory floors, manufacturing tools are configured in the virtual realm, dramatically cutting the incidence of production errors and improving the fit of finished parts. Even the local drugstore has become a bastion of computer design. Have you noticed the curvy Colgate toothbrushes in bright colors? Or the sleek coffee pots at Target? CAD systems have given industrial designers unprecedented control over shapes and forms. How about those slick new cars that look both vaguely futuristic and distinctly retro? Couldn't happen without advanced 3-D modeling programs running on desktop computers to model the silhouettes. A WHOLE NEW SECTOR. "All the beautiful shapes you see, if you were dealing with them on paper would be much more complex," says Brian Vogel, the executive vice-president of the Industrial Designers Society of America. On a computer, though, "you can prepare the curved surfaces in an industrial-design package, transfer it to an engineering package, and maintain the integrity of the design. You can produce things that without these tools you wouldn't have been able to" as recently as six or seven years ago. So important and impressive are the results, that the nexus of computers, design, and engineering has blossomed into a its own technology sector. According to engineering-technology researcher Daratech, the mechanical CAD market should top $6.3 billion in 2002 and grow at a 6.8% annual rate through 2007. That estimate doesn't include computer-assisted engineering (CAE) and computer-assisted manufacturing (CAM) software. The two are variations on CAD products that are aimed at solving the physics and math problems of engineers and the tolerance and the layout problems of manufacturing equipment and plant designers. Daratech's number also doesn't count electronics and circuit-design software, on which companies spend billions to create in-house tools. WHAT'S IT WORTH? Suffice it to say that across America, companies now spend upwards of $10 billion a year on computerized-design processes and tools. By most measures, they're getting their money's worth. Few companies that have computerized their design and engineering are able to precisely quantify how much they've saved, because taking the leap inherently changes the way their businesses run. For example, how can you put a dollar sign on the benefit to a company when its marketing staff has a clearer idea earlier of what a next-generation product will look like and do? Yet that's a huge advantage, say computer design aficionados -- if only because the word gets around faster. "When it becomes digital, everything is Internet-enabled, so anyone can look at the information," notes Mike Burkett, a research director at AMR Research, a strategic-technology consultancy headquartered in Boston. Regular users of computerized design and engineering notice an interesting paradox. Fewer people are required to accomplish the development work to push out each individual product. But a wider range of employees within an organization can provide useful inputs into that work. In this sense, computerized design echoes the changes the Internet has wrought in organizations. BOTTLENECK BYPASS. Powerful desktop computers can now handle tasks that required big engineering workstations only a few years ago. And it turns out that an unintended consequence of popular computer games is that snappy video-rendering cards are now standard issue for PCs. These specialized graphics cards also work well for manipulating 3-D objects on design projects. So as peppy PCs have become ubiquitous, the need for skilled draftsmen has diminished. At the same time, though, anyone who has access to a computer can play the game, thanks in large part to broadband links to the Internet at home and at work. Those connections can easily move the massive files that are the staple of design, engineering, planning, and manufacturing. Gone is the bottleneck of the early 3-D days, when only a handful of heavy-duty machines could handle the computing burden of 3-D design, and the only way to involve others in a project was to pass around blueprints or herd everyone in front of the engineering department's workstations. Equally important, the latest software is making engineers and designers smarter -- and helping them catch errors earlier in the design process. That's key, as the cost of rectifying mistakes generally rises an order of magnitude each step further into the product development cycle. FLOWING DOWNSTREAM. At IBM, microelectronics engineers now test the logic and geometry of packed integrated-circuit chips using special programs. "As you get down to these very fine geometries, a signal flowing across one tiny copper wire [integrated into the chip] could potentially influence a neighboring copper wire," explains Tim Ravey, a director of electronic design automation (EDA) at IBM. "We have the capability to test whether we will have a noise effect on a neighbor. The algorithms anticipate those physical effects, and the software can automatically reroute a wire to a different location." With prototypes of new ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) chips costing $1 million and up, using software to analyze a chip's properties ahead of time can save a bundle. As the cost of design software has fallen and its capabilities have improved, small and midsize businesses have begun to integrate computerized design into their routines. The cost per seat of such software usually is in the $5,000 to $10,000 range -- meaning that companies that hope to have a future increasingly have little choice but to plunge into virtual design. An extreme example is suppliers to big car companies, which face a mandate to go digital with design software that's compatible with their customer's -- or get out of the game. LESS TRAVEL. Driving those mandates are the rise of widely dispersed project teams. Until two or three years ago, sharing complicated blueprints and complex images over the Internet remained a problem. Security was a big risk in moving around, say, sensitive airplane design information. Now, though, watermarking, digital signatures, and encryption have made files harder to intercept, even as companies try ever-harder to keep closer track of design revisions, a key step in building complex systems and also quickly spotting and resolving problems on a project. Moving massive data files around on desktop computers was impractical in the days before the 1-gigahertz Pentium processor, which made its debut in 2000. To a large degree, that's no longer an issue. "What you had to do prior to two years ago was set up a program office and co-locate engineers so they could physically be next to each other. Now, companies can share that information online, so they don't have to travel and have design reviews," says AMR's Burkett. This may also explain, in part, why Autodesk has noted a dramatic shift in what its customers want. The company originally rode to prominence with its two-dimensional AutoCAD electronic drafting program. That software remained popular, even as the Autodesk branched out into more advanced three-dimensional applications. 3-D BY DEFAULT. Yet Chief Technology Officer Scott Borduin says Autodesk recently has witnessed a radical shift. "Over the past 24 months, sales of design tools into the manufacturing market have gone from 80% 2-D drafting and 20% 3-D drafting to the exact opposite," he says. "The three-dimensional products are now becoming the default method of doing design in manufacturing environments, even in small operations with fast product cycles," Borduin adds. The upshot? Computerized design and engineering is no longer the exotic stuff from which only submarines are made. Rather, it's the way nearly all things will be made in the 21st century. And someday soon, today's elementary schools kids will marvel at how the old folks ever got anything like the Space Shuttle designed in a 2-D world.  By Alex Salkever Get BusinessWeek directly on your desktop with our RSS feeds.  Add BusinessWeek news to your Web site with our headline feed. Click to buy an e-print or reprint of a BusinessWeek or BusinessWeek Online story or video. To subscribe online to BusinessWeek magazine, please click here. 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