Abstract

This paper addresses, for the 1988 time frame, trends in hardware (i.e., workstations, local area networks, and computational servers) and open systems. An engineering scenario and analysis is presented to expose fundamental shifts in business values and orientations and to portray the ends to which the trends are directed. Each topic is discussed in terms of its driving force, contributing technologies, most critical choice, best selection, and trends.

 

Introduction

Those responsible for computer aided design (CAD) in the late eighties are faced with difficult decisions on many fronts: technical, managerial, and organizational. The biggest challenges to realizing the promises of CAD/CAM are managerial, but even so, the challenges in the technical and organizational arenas are substantial. Furthermore, the classical approach to decision making of dividing problems into separate parts is becoming inappropriate as engineering decisions become more dependent on overall business issues. Therefore, the first section of this paper, Engineering in the late 1980s, puts the CAD decisions in a larger business context. The remainder of the paper is the presentation of CAD hardware and open system technical trends within this business context.

The engineering scenario has the engineer orchestrating workstation, network and server in symbiotic pursuit of better, quicker designs. More important, though, are the non-technical influences on the conduct of engineering. For example, a major shift in values is said to be occurring. Specifically, the time honored concern for productivity, cost reduction, and production are being replaced by concern for timeliness, margin enhancement, and design. The trends which will be sustained are those which contribute to these new business values and orientations.

The actual hardware trends are divided into workstations, local area networks, and computational servers. The trends in each presents us with a fundamental choice. In workstations, we must choose between personal computer and workstations. With local area networks, in 1988 we'll be choosing between fiber optical cable and twisted pair. Ironically, the choice in the case of the most difficult product technologically, computational servers, is the least technical; it is whether to buy from an established company or a start-up.

The open systems trends revolve around standards. The most strategic selection to make is whether or not to adopt IGES (or SET) as a neutral data base or to postpone such a commitment until a better standard emerges. Another strategic open systems' selection which must be made is whether to insist that all device inputs and outputs (including spooled files and archived data output files) conform to GKS (or Core or PHIGS) or not. The other important open systems' issue is whether or not to adopt UNIX as a standard operating system. Language standardization, on the other hand, is not too material to Open Systems as long as their respective standards and bindings (to pertinent systems, such as GKS) are adhered to.

 

Environment

The engineer of the late 1980s begins the day by, say, reading the electronic mail and perusing his or her project's electronic bulletin board. Although the engineer has a powerful graphics workstation, that much computing power isn't needed for these initial tasks, but at least they are performed using the same user interface as heftier tasks and the same familiar collection of software tool kit resources.

The electronic mail messages include a notification of a successful Finite Element Analysis (FEA) run from the previous evening, a notification of a footprint mismatch, and an invitation to a social gathering. The project bulletin board advises those who might be affected by yesterday's customer request for a specification change to attend an eleven o'clock meeting to figure out a response.

A close look at the FEA results is reassuring. A few annotations attached onto the critical portion of the model's geometry insures, hopefully, that a particularly effective design intent remains intact through any subsequent edits. Next, a few incidental edits are made to the model to accommodate the footprint mismatch followed by an electronic mail message which apprises the appropriate cognizant engineer. So much for the final stages of that part.

Now, the engineer begins the design of a new part. First a textual description is entered from which keywords are extracted and used as the basis of activating existing parts which might satisfy the design requirement. The visual presentations of the most likely possibilities show that no existing part will do. One of the parts, the engineer decides, is worth using as a starting point. A few modifications of its dimensions and the introduction of a necessary twist completes the design, which previously would have taken over a week, in under an hour. However, there is a warning that the manufacturability of this part has been rendered unknown and should be determined before investing heavily in this design. A highly interactive "tradeoff session" is required to resolve the manufacturability issues, so the engineer leaves the office to talk to the project leader to get some guidelines before proceeding. The engineer expects to resolve the manufacturability that same afternoon and paces himself or herself so that an FEA run will be ready for that evening. And so it goes...

Underlying Non-technical Influences

On the surface, this engineer's day may look like an orderly, straightforward transition from today's hodgepodge of memos, meetings, scheduling, consultations, and computer hassles. The apparent ease with which these designs progress resulted from a large investment in new means and methods for the conduct of engineering. These new means are carefully selected and integrated systems which complement a new set of managerial values and organizational orientations.

The time honored managerial values of: productivity, discipline, specialization, cost reduction, failure minimization, and return on investment are becoming inappropriate to sustaining a competitive advantage, and so they are being replaced by a new set of values. The set of new values I see emerging are: timeliness, creativity, integration, margin enhancement, success maximization, and resource utilization (see Table 1). The old organizational orientations to centralized controls, functional departments, organization hierarchy, policies, production, and industrial resources I see as yielding to project autonomy, project teams, personal networks, culture, design, and information resources (see Table 2).

Table 1

Table 2

CAD hardware and open systems trends that will be sustained are those which are complementary to these paradigm shifts. As an example, the trend towards workstations is a significant facilitator of timeliness and creativity in the pursuit of high margin designs. As a counterexample, the conspicuous trend away from the "islands of automation" could be attributed not only to the inherent lack of integratability, but also to the lack of timeliness caused by manually iterating around the simulate - design - analyze loop. Furthermore, as engineering design activities blend into an engineering design process, the flexibility of components becomes more important than the performance of components.

 

Workstations

Driving Force

The driving force in workstations is to give individual engineers sufficient computing power and memory capacity to allow them to create, simulate, and analyze their designs interactively for all but their most comprehensive analyses. The computing power challenge to do this is to provide high powered vector processing, image processing, and general purpose processing. The memory challenge is simply to have sufficient memory for 90 to 95%" of all tasks at affordable prices. This challenge translates into 1 to 10 million bytes (megabytes) of resident semiconductor memory and 20 to 100 megabytes of rotating magnetic memory for under $10,000.

Contributing Technologies

The technologies contributing to workstation trends are: CMOS semiconductors, gate arrays, surface mounted chips, and magnetics. CMOS semiconductors will reach 1-2 million circuits per chip resulting in 1 megabit memory chips and 5 million instruction per second (mips) processor running at 24 million hertz (megahertz). Gate arrays will be the major technology for implementing high speed customized logic. Surface mounted chips will effectively double board capacity and allow all workstations to be desktop consoles. Magnetic memories (not optical nor vertical magnetic) memories will be preferred for rotating memory and will have twice the capacity at today's prices.

Workstation versus Personal Computer

Engineers will have one of two fairly distinct choices for doing their CAD work. Either they will use a workstation or a personal computer. Specific prices and specifications is highly speculative, but are offered in the spirit of trying to be helpful.

The engineering workstation will be a $20,000 compact desktop engineering workstation whose specifications might be: