CAD applications

The next most cited group of observations concerned backup and archive. Systematic backups are required to meet defined schedules. Backups and archives must be maintained for the duration of the record retention requirements and for records readily retrievable. The Warning Letters making these observations referred to CDS, Spreadsheets, electronic drawings and to the implied use of Computer Aided Drawing (CAD) application, complaint files, and Device History Records. 

The virtual memory settings (see Figure 14.14) tell you how much hard drive space is allocated to the system as a swap file. For a review of what virtual memory is, return to Part II, Chapter 13, Windows 95/98. Windows 2000 recommends a particular virtual memory level, but you can add to or subtract from this as you need. Often, certain applications (SQL Server for instance) will need to have Windows 2000 Professional s virtual memory limit raised in order to work properly. Graphics and CAD applications also require raising the virtual memory level, but if this is the case, the setup instructions for the application will generally tell you what modifications need to be made. 

The result is that whereas a truly accurate drawing is still a difficult aim in conventional Computer-Aided Design (CAD) applications, the drawing becomes one possible window on the data in such advanced systems. This clearly is a complex, expensive process and has only succeeded where an industry and its suppliers have agreed to cooperate in the development of the definitions. This transferability of information is essential to competitive survival in the car, oil and aircraft industries. Pharmaceutical companies are now beginning to follow suit. 

Organizational factors like user qualification and training, support structures, data exchange with other applications, and so on are the most important factors for an efficient (and economic) CAD application in terms of performance and psyehophysiological responses. 

Windows NT is emerging as the preferred operating system for many of the new vendors of solid modeling CAD systems. These newer companies are offering many downstream applications such as CAE analysis and NC machining with their products. Frequently, these downstream products are produced by different vendors and are well integrated with the CAD application. This will allow users to mix and match their CAD/CAE/CAM systems in future. 

During the second half of the 90s, the VEGA project (ESPRIT IV program) presented a proposal to bridge the gap between four standards (STEP, SGML, CORBA, EDI) developing the COrba Access to STep models (COAST) platform and services for distributing CAD applications. 

Other CAD applications include calcium scoring, used to detect and quantify calcified coronary and aorta plaques, analysis of retinal fundus images for leaking blood vessels as an early indicator for diabetes, and the inspection of skin spots for melanoma (of particular attention in Australia), Burroni 2004. 

Today s CAD software is often sold in packages that feature all of the programs needed for CAD applications. These fall into two categories graphics software and analysis software. Graphics software makes use of... 

In order for CAD applications to run across systems from various vendors, four main formats facilitate this data exchange IGES (Initial Graphics Exchange Specification), STEP (Standard for the Exchange of Product Model Data), DXF (Drawing Exchange Format), and ACIS (American Committee for Inter-operable Systems)... 

There are minimum requirements of PC configurations for various CAD applications. This area of development has more capability than what is reviewed here and because of its rapid advances whatever listing exists is continually outdated. 

S. A. Barley and R. J. Cripps (1992) "Executive-Centred System Design for CAD Applications" Computer-Aided Design, 245,235-242. 

DIS), an extensible object-oriented database model, which has also been used for VLSI/CAD application environments (see and ). The 3DIS provides an approach in which data and the descriptive information about the data are handled in a uniform framework. It is especially suited to represent information objects of various levels of abstraction and modality, and supports various views of the same data which is essential for this type of engineering database. In addition to that, the EDEN system supports a number of novel modeling constructs, one of which makes it possible to interpret parts of the data as graphs and to express retrievals, constraints and updates in terms of graph operations. 

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