What are the characteristics of solidworks?

SolidWorks is a subsidiary of dassault systemes (NASDAQ: DASTY), which specializes in developing and selling Windows products of mechanical design software. Dassault Company is responsible for the supply of system software and provides support services with Internet integration capability for manufacturers. The group provides systems covering the whole product life cycle, including the best software systems in various fields, such as design, engineering, manufacturing and product data management. The famous CATIAV5 comes from this company. At present, the market share of Dassault CAD products ranks among the top in the world.

SolidWorks was founded in 1993, initiated by the vice president of technology of PTC Company and the vice president of CV Company, and headquartered in Concord, Massachusetts. The initial task is to provide an efficient solid model design system on each engineer's desktop. Since 1995 launched the first set of SolidWorks 3D mechanical design software, it has set up offices all over the world and sold and distributed the product in 140 countries through 300 dealers. SolidWorks software is the first 3D CAD system based on Windows in the world. Because technological innovation conforms to the development trend and tide of CAD technology, SolidWorks has become the most profitable company in CAD/CAM industry within two years. Good financial situation and user support make SolidWorks have dozens or even hundreds of technological innovations every year, and the company has also won many honors. The system won the first place in the evaluation of global microcomputer platform CAD system in 1995- 1999; Since 1995, it has won 17 international awards, among which CADENCE, the authoritative professional magazine of CAD in the United States, awarded SolidWorks the Best Editor Award for four consecutive years in recognition of SolidWorks' innovation, vitality and simplicity. At this point, the three principles followed by SolidWorks, ease of use, stability and innovation, have been fully implemented and proved. Using SolidWorks, designers greatly shorten the design time, and products can be put into the market quickly and efficiently.

SolidWorks, because of its excellent technology and market performance, has not only become a dazzling star in CAD field, but also a favorite object of Wall Street. Finally SolidWorks was wholly-owned by Dassault 1997, with a market value as high as $30.1100 million. The original venture capitalists and shareholders of the company invested13 million US dollars in venture capital, which achieved high returns and created a world record in CAD industry. After the merger, SolidWorks continued to operate independently with the original brand and management technical team, becoming a high-quality professional company in the CAD industry, and SolidWorks three-dimensional mechanical design software became the most competitive CAD product in Dassault enterprises.

Due to the use of Windows OLE technology, intuitive design technology, advanced parasolid kernel (provided by Cambridge) and good integration technology with third-party software, SolidWorks has become the most installed and best used software in the world. The data shows that the number of SolidWorks software licenses worldwide is about 280,000, involving about 3 1000 enterprises in more than 0/00 countries around the world, including aerospace, locomotives, food, machinery, national defense, transportation, molds, electronic communication, medical equipment, entertainment industry, daily necessities/consumer goods, discrete manufacturing and so on. In the education market, nearly 145000 students from 4300 educational institutions around the world pass SolidWorks training courses every year.

According to monster (), a world-renowned talent website, compared with other 3D CAD systems, SolidWorks-related job advertisements are more than the sum of other softwares, which objectively shows that more and more engineers use SolidWorks, and more and more enterprises employ SolidWorks talents. According to statistics, users around the world spend 55 million hours using SolidWorks every year.

In the United States, well-known universities including Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Stanford University have listed SolidWorks as a compulsory course for manufacturing majors, and some domestic universities (educational institutions) such as Tsinghua University, Beihang University, Beijing Institute of Technology and Shanghai Education Bureau are also applying SolidWorks for teaching. I believe that in the next 5~8 years, SolidWorks will become the industry standard of 3D popular mainstream software and even CAD, just like AutoCAD today.

Second, the characteristics of SolidWorks software

1. The first CAD software developed under Windows operating system.

It adopts Windows series, is fully compatible with Windows system, and is an OLE/2 product of Windows.

2. Less menus, intuitive and simple use and friendly interface.

SolidWorks * * * only has more than 60 commands, and other commands are the same as Windows commands; The drop-down menu generally has only two layers (three layers are not more than five layers); Graphical menu design is simple and lively, with visual effects, which can be seen at a glance. All parameters of the system are set in one option, which is easy to find and set. Dynamic boot is intelligent and generally does not need to be modified by users. The feature tree is unique, and both entities and light sources can be found in the feature tree, so it is very convenient to operate features. All concepts of assembly constraints are very simple and easy to understand. The modeling and assembly of entities completely conform to the three-dimensional world of nature. The operations such as enlargement, reduction and rotation of entities are transparent commands, which can be used in any command process, and the selection of entities is also very easy and convenient.

3. Rich data conversion interfaces and high conversion success rate.

SolidWorks supports IGES, DXF, DWG, SAT(ACSI), STEP, STL, ASC or binary VDAFS(VDA, special for automobile industry), VRML, Parasolid and other standards. , and has special interfaces with CATIA, Pro/Engineer, UG, MDT, Inventor, etc. The data conversion between SolidWorks and I-DEAS, ANSYS, Pro/Engineer and AutoCAD is very successful and smooth.

4. Unique configuration function

SolidWorks allows the creation of parts with many different configurations, which can greatly save time in designing common parts or parts with similar shapes.

5. Function Manager

PropertyManager is a unique technology of SolidWorks, which can manipulate and drag parts without occupying space in drawing area.

6. Top-down assembly design technology.

At present, only SolidWorks provides top-down assembly design technology, which enables designers to capture the design relationship between parts, design new parts and edit existing parts in the assembly when designing parts and blank parts.

7. Scaling technology

A mold cavity or core can be obtained by giving the mold parts different contractions in the X, Y and Z directions.

8. Surface design tools

Using SolidWorks, designers can create very complex surfaces, such as complex parting surfaces mixed by two or more mold surfaces. Designers can also cut, lengthen, round and sew surfaces.

The Third Party Software ——SolidWorks' Golden Partner

1. Tektronix Software Company

The famous CAM software developer, the earliest gold partner of SolidWorks, has now become one of the indispensable CAM plug-ins of SolidWorks.

2.SRAC Company

The famous CAE software developer was acquired by SolidWorks. COSMOSWorks developed by COSMOS Works is a famous analysis software, and in the new version of SolidWorks2004, Cosmos became a plug-in of SolidWorks-Cosmos Xpress, so that the preliminary finite element analysis of parts can be carried out without leaving SolidWorks environment.

Fourth, the system requirements

1. Microsoft Windows NT4.0 or Microsoft Windows2000 (recommended);

2. Pentium 4 personal computers;

3. Memory ≥ 128M, hard disk ≥40G.