Tech Soft 3D and Nvidia announced a new collaboration to further the mission of OpenUSD, the Pixar-created 3D file framework underpinning Nvidia’s Omniverse platform.

For starters, Tech Soft 3D has officially joined the Alliance for OpenUSD (AOUSD). It will now work alongside founding members Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, Nvidia and Pixar, plus all the other general members, to develop and champion the 3D standard.

But the real boost for Universal Scene Description, to use the framework’s formal name, is in Tech Soft 3D’s latest release of HOOPS Exchange. The software development toolkit for CAD data translation now supports export to OpenUSD, which Tech Soft 3D says will allow developers to bring engineering data from over 30 CAD file formats, including Catia, STEP, Solidworks, and more, into any 3D application that supports OpenUSD.

“Tech Soft 3D’s investment in USD is great news for the entire industrial and CAD ecosystem,” said Aaron Luk, director of product management at Nvidia, in Tech Soft 3D’s press release. (OpenUSD used to be called USD, but the name was changed when the Alliance for OpenUSD launched in 2023.)

Luk continued: “HOOPS offers an unparalleled opportunity for CAD users to seamlessly connect their data to USD, unleashing the immense power of its composition capabilities to aggregate diverse data sources and construct comprehensive digital twins for industrial and physical AI use cases.”

This is the first I’m hearing about the AI use cases for OpenUSD, but I’d be more surprised if Nvidia didn’t find a way to bring it up somehow.

Siemens and Altair are enjoying their honeymoon

Three months later, how’s Siemens’ $10 billion acquisition of Altair going?

I’m glad you asked, because I sat down with Sam Mahalingam, CTO of Altair, and Jean-Claude Ercolanelli, SVP of simulation and test solutions at Siemens Digital Industries Software, to get answers.

One surprising revelation: Altair, the brand, is going away. Turns out Siemens is serious about that ONE Tech Company thing.

For more inside details, including how the simulation developers are using AI, check out Siemens and Altair are on a mission to “transform engineering.”

Design and Simulation Week 2025

If you’re not already counting down the days to Engineering.com’s annual Design and Simulation Week, here’s your 20-day warning.

Running the week of July 14, 2025, this series of expert webinars will explore the top trends in engineering software from some of the leading voices in the industry (and me). You’ll learn about AI, automation, multiphysics and how to make the most of modern tools.

Register for Design and Simulation Week now and start counting.

Quick hits

• IMSI Design has released TurboCAD Mac 16, the latest version of its 2D and 3D CAD platform for macOS. It’s available as a perpetual license in four tiers: Platinum, Pro, Deluxe, and Designer, in descending order of price and functionality.
• Kubotek Kosmos has released KeyCreator 2025 Service Pack 2, which includes updated CAD file format translators and minor enhancements such as more text formatting options.
• Hexagon is preparing to spin off several of its divisions into a standalone company called Octave. It would include Hexagon’s existing Asset Lifecycle Intelligence and Safety, Infrastructure and Geospatial divisions, plus ETQ (currently operating under the Manufacturing Intelligence division), and Bricsys (currently operating under the Geosystems division and developer of the BricsCAD platform). The spinoff remains subject to shareholder, Board, and regulatory approvals.
• Siemens Digital Industries Software is showing off new AI tools for electronic design automation (EDA) at the 2025 Design Automation Conference this week in San Francisco. The company says it’s developed “a new EDA AI system specifically designed for semiconductor and PCB design environments” that “delivers secure, advanced generative and agentic AI capabilities, offering unparalleled customization capabilities and seamless integration across the entire EDA workflow.”

One last link

Michelle Froese of EV Engineering & Infrastructure explains Why EV architecture changes the rules for self-driving systems.

Got news, tips, comments, or complaints? Send them my way: malba@wtwhmedia.com.

The post CAD to OpenUSD export gets easier appeared first on Engineering.com.

Earlier this month at Siemens’ Realize Live Americas 2025 user conference, Engineering.com sat down with a pair of execs for an inside look at the $10 billion acquisition.

Sam Mahalingam, CTO of Altair, and Jean-Claude Ercolanelli, senior vice president of simulation and test solutions at Siemens Digital Industries Software, revealed their thoughts on the transition, what it means for Siemens and Altair users, and how AI will play a big role in the combined simulation portfolio.

The following transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Engineering.com: How’s the acquisition going? Sam, what’s it like working for Siemens?

Sam Mahalingam: Fantastic, fantastic. It’s a bigger family that we [Altair] are coming into. Altair was almost one tenth the size of Siemens software.

Our culture fit is truly good. Our core values were envisioning the future, technology first, embracing diversity and open, honest communication. It was all about, how can we start expediting innovation?

That was the kind of culture that we had. And coming into a larger company like Siemens, initially, I was a little worried whether there would be a similar kind of a culture or not. But I was pleasantly surprised. I think the culture is very, very, very similar to what it was at Altair. This whole one tech vision that Siemens has, I think, nicely fits in. And at the same time, Siemens software has been a company that understands the world of engineering, and our genesis was also in the world of physics-based simulation. And so I think it is a perfect match in my opinion. And so far, it’s been great.

Engineering.com: And Jean-Claude—how do you like Altair?

Jean-Claude Ercolanelli: First of all, I second every word that Sam just said. I was pleasantly surprised to see the same cultural fit, the same drive for excellence for the customers. Solving customer problems, putting the customers at the center and bringing the powerful tech to actually solve and address problems.

But beside this, what I found is Siemens has been paying a lot of attention and taking care of the people. Our business is about the people that are creating these products and solutions, and Siemens recognizes that. And I’m sure that Altair was doing the same. And I think it’s maybe the common theme of the tech culture. There’s no tech without the people.

Sam Mahalingam: I always used to say CTO doesn’t mean chief technical officer or chief technology officer, it means chief talent officer. You need to identify the right talent and bring them into the organization. At the end of the day, it’s the people who make or break the company. And if you bring in the right people, the bright-eyed into the organization, you are automatically going to see a tremendous amount of innovation that’s going to come out of that organization, and absolute agility as well.

Engineering.com: What’s in store for Altair users? Are they going to notice any big changes, or is it just a matter of changing the name on the invoice?

Jean-Claude Ercolanelli: Right now it’s still Altair on the invoice. It’s Altair and Siemens, but after the merge of the legal entities, they will only get one invoice.

Sam Mahalingam: It’s a true integration that is being worked out. There will no longer be the Altair brand. It will just be Siemens.

Engineering.com: Do you have a timeline on that?

Sam Mahalingam: We have a plan in place, but I don’t want to share that. We are working through that right now.

Engineering.com: In terms of the software itself—Altair HyperWorks, for example—is that going to get a Siemens skin on top?

Jean-Claude Ercolanelli: Might be the opposite. Who knows? Here we want to give the best of both, and they have a proven user experience and workflow that they bring the user from the start to end of the analysis work. And you know, the colors may change—the colors will change—but it really is a true integration from the technology standpoint.

Sam Mahalingam: Yes, I think in terms of the user experience, both sides have put in a lot of effort to modernize the user experience for the engineering world. And so we’ll take the best of the both worlds and make sure that it reflects as part of the integrated offering that we provide. But our intent is to make sure that the products get integrated. I mean, it all takes time. It’s not going to happen tomorrow, but as we go through the integration process, as we finish the integration process, it will be one portfolio of products from Siemens.

Engineering.com: Will it be part of Simcenter?

Sam Mahalingam: All the design and simulation tools will be part of the Simcenter portfolio, but the high performance computing and the data analytics and AI will not be part of Simcenter.

[Neither Ercolanelli nor Mahalingam would comment on what portfolio those tools would eventually join, though it may not exist yet; Siemens is actively expanding its center collection. For more, see What is Siemens Designcenter?]

Engineering.com: How is AI impacting simulation at Altair?

Sam Mahalingam: [Altair] started investing in engineering AI almost seven, eight years ago. It was an initial small investment in terms of figuring out how AI can truly add value to the whole simulation world.

Everybody was quick to jump into this whole notion of physics-infused neural nets. We also built something in that space. And then later on, we realized that it’s not just the data-based model that people are looking at. We need to also understand the geometry of the 3D model, along with the material, along with the constraints, your boundary conditions, and the load cases that you’re going to apply. This is extremely important as to how you want to capture these features for an AI model.

And that is where I think the ground-up development started, and PhysicsAI was that vision that we put in place. How do we capture the physics-based characteristics as features within the deep learning model which truly understands geometry as well? So I think that was a groundbreaking technology that we built.

Once we introduced PhysicsAI and we embedded that into our modeling visualization tools, we were pleasantly surprised at the amount of users within our customer base who started using PhysicsAI. And then at the end of 2023 we did a survey and we were pleasantly surprised at the amount of use cases for which PhysicsAI was being used. And when we documented those use cases, after surveying our customers, we came to around 115 different use cases for which PhysicsAI was being leveraged. So that is how fast customers started picking it up, because we nicely embedded PhysicsAI right into the tools that they were using on a day-to-day basis.

Engineering.com: Do you have any other plans for using AI in simulation?

Jean-Claude Ercolanelli: Yeah, we’re actually using AI for accelerating solvers. We’re working on AI chat for the documentation. And having a virtual agent to help guide a user, like a virtual engineer, to do automated and repetitive tasks.

Sam Mahalingam: Deloitte, one of our global system integrator partners, actually created agentic AI, leveraging Altair RapidMiner, as a virtual engineer. You command it and it starts driving our products right from opening up a model, cleaning up the model, setting up the load cases, asking it to run the simulation, and then coming back and generating the report. It was a fantastic agent that they put together themselves leveraging all of our tools.

Engineering.com: What’s the most exciting thing on the horizon for Siemens and Altair?

Sam Mahalingam: I think the way we can provide a complete lifecycle intelligence solution with our Siemens Xcelerator-as-a-Service. That’s what excites me. Intelligence for all the different lifecycles: product lifecycle, manufacturing lifecycle, process lifecycle and business lifecycle.

Jean-Claude Ercolanelli: For me, it’s the ability to really deliver that comprehensive digital twin to our customers. That’s one thing, but also that digital thread. So the integration of both technologies into the entire product lifecycle, what Sam calls the intelligent lifecycle. So that’s two things that really excite me. We want to deliver solutions to our customers so they can fix the pains, the challenges.

Sam Mahalingam: We want to amplify innovation for our customers so that they achieve engineering brilliance.

Jean-Claude Ercolanelli: We actually can transform engineering together.

The post Siemens and Altair are on a mission to “transform engineering” appeared first on Engineering.com.

It may be a vast and sprawling jungle of technology, but if you can hack your way through it the benefits are immense. Today’s design and simulation tools can help you be a better, more efficient engineer, allowing you and your team to get products to market faster while spending less. Using the right tools in the right way can give you engineering superpowers.

Okay, but how? You don’t have to hack your way through the jungle alone. Let Engineering.com’s Design and Simulation Week 2025, kicking off July 14, be your guide.

In this series of webinars, we’re bringing in industry experts to map the territory of design and simulation software—teaching you what tools, trends and techniques will be most valuable to you and your organization. You’ll see how other engineers are leveraging new technology, learn how to plan your own digital transformation and have the chance to interact directly with our expert guests. The only thing you won’t get is lunch (too many ants in the jungle, anyways).

Registrations are now open. Here’s what’s in store for the week:

July 14: Welcome to Design and Simulation Week 2025

12:00 PM Eastern Daylight Time

Welcome to Engineering.com’s Design and Simulation Week 2025, where we’ll help you stay on top of the most exciting developments in engineering software. In this kickoff session, we’ll explore the design and simulation tools, trends and techniques that are shaping new engineering workflows, with a preview of the sessions and speakers you’ll see in the week to come.

What you’ll learn:

• What are the software trends you need to be aware of?
• Is AI really ready for engineering software?
• How can you take full advantage of Design and Simulation Week 2025?

Register here

July 15: The rise of AI agents in engineering: What can we expect?

12:00 PM Eastern Daylight Time

The next revolution in engineering simulation has begun, and AI is increasingly in the driver’s seat.

AI in simulation isn’t just about accelerating physics predictions any longer. AI agents are becoming capable of core engineering work too—handling decisions, performing model setup, and running simulations. But with this new era comes a pressing question: will these powerful tools disrupt the traditional role of engineers, or unlock new levels of human ingenuity?

Join us as we explore the rise of AI agents in engineering and dive into the realities behind the buzzwords. Whether you’re curious, cautious, or actively exploring AI-driven workflows, this interactive session will help you separate fact from fiction—and prepare for what’s next.

What you’ll learn:

• What AI agents are: See how Engineering AI and Physics AI is reshaping the experience of simulation in engineering workflows.
• Real-world use cases: See the concepts put into context with examples of AI agents solving complex engineering tasks.
• A vision and strategy for AI tooling: Understand the value we see this unlocking in the future.

Register here

July 15: Best practices for scaling automation

2:00 PM Eastern Daylight Time

Manufacturers today are under growing pressure to deliver more custom solutions under ever-tightening schedules. Customers are demanding bespoke products, and manufacturers need to find ways to deliver, without taking excessive time away from engineering resources.

The solution? Automation. Makes sense, but where do you begin and how can you scale your automation strategy?

What you’ll learn:

• How automation helps reduce repetitive tasks in mechanical design.
• How to reduce time to market when configuring bespoke products.
• How you can win more business with custom made forms for sales.

Register here

July 16: Physics AI: The engineering revolution you need to be prepared for

12:00 PM Eastern Daylight Time

The Physics AI revolution is happening right now in engineering, and the availability of massive amounts of data together with recent advances in physics-based AI/ML modeling architectures is making it possible.

This revolution will have a meaningful and disruptive impact on how products are designed and how engineering teams are organized and work.

With advances in large-scale data availability, Physics AI models can be trained in specific domains with inference times around 1-3 seconds and accuracy in the predictions of the physics and derived quantities in the range of 1-2%.

What you’ll learn:

• Recent trends in Physics AI including most likely uses in engineering product development.
• How availability of massive amounts of high-fidelity data affects model accuracy for both scalar output quantities and field prediction.
• Domain-specific vs foundational models: How far can we currently push Physics AI models and how can we improve model generalizability?
• See examples of industrial applications of Physics AI.

Register here

July 17: Challenges, trends and opportunities in multiphysics simulation in 2025

12:00 PM Eastern Daylight Time

In this webinar, we’ll present the results from a recent survey of 250 engineers and decision-makers working in high-technology R&D. We’ll cover the 4 key challenges faced with multiphysics simulation and examine industry perceptions around modern platforms and emerging technologies.

Attendees will gain a clear understanding of the current landscape of multiphysics simulation and how new approaches are being implemented to address the common bottlenecks.

What you’ll learn:

• The 4 key challenges faced with multiphysics simulation in high-tech R&D.
• The role of modern platforms and emerging technologies addressing these challenges.
• Real-world examples of how these technologies are impacting simulation workflows today.

Register here

Don’t miss out! Register now for Engineering.com’s Design and Simulation Week 2025.

The post Secure your spot for Design and Simulation Week 2025 appeared first on Engineering.com.

Duro, the cloud-based PLM provider, has relaunched its platform as Duro Design.

Michael Corr, co-founder and CEO of Duro, told me that the change is more than just a new product name. “It’s really a new product… a revolution of what we’re doing, not just an incremental evolution,” he said.

Duro first launched its eponymous PLM platform in 2018, targeting startups and small-to-medium businesses looking for a quick and modern alternative to that jack-of-all-trades, Excel.

“We were very limited in functionality and very automated and opinionated, because we just helped customers implement industry best practices out of the box,” Corr said.

Since then, Corr said, the market for modern PLM tools has evolved. “The level of innovation that’s happening today is unprecedented,” he said, referring both to new hardware companies and the SaaS software startups catering to them. Duro’s customers wanted more capability, configurability and compatibility, and Corr saw that the platform could either adapt or harden into the same kind of stale PLM tool it had been built to disrupt.

“We recognized there was a unique small window to just completely revamp our platform and really meet what this market had evolved to be,” Corr said.

Duro Design is that revamp. Duro’s legacy PLM platform will be phased out and the company will help existing customers migrate to Duro Design.

So what’s the difference? A big part of it, as you might imagine, is AI. Corr describes Duro Design as “AI-native,” a phrase which I asked him to define (lest it come across as marketing fluff).

“Deep refactoring of our platform allowed us to leverage what was becoming the best practices for building AI-based tools,” Corr told me. “We changed our database structure, we changed our API structure, so that AI technologies, LLMs and even generative AI capabilities, were being built natively in the core of our platform, versus being a bolt-on after the fact.”

For example, Duro Design uses AI for natural language search, helping users more easily sort through heaps of design data. Users can also manage their PLM environment with AI by prompting changes to the underlying YAML configuration language (YAML ain’t markup language, if you’re a fan of backronyms). Duro Design also uses AI to analyze change orders and provide predictions and recommendations, according to Corr.

AI isn’t the only difference. Sandwich in a P and you get another tentpole of Duro Design: API.

“Following an API first approach, every single feature that we offer is exposed through the API,” Corr said, in contrast to the more limited API of the legacy platform. “[Users] can reconfigure their account as they wish. They could build their own integrations. They can even build their own front end web client if they wanted to.”

As far as integrations go, Duro offers plenty of its own with add-ins for Solidworks, NX (or should I say Designcenter), Altium 365, Onshape and more.

Speaking of Onshape…

Onshape gets MBD

PTC announced that its cloud CAD platform Onshape will soon be capable of model-based definition (MBD). The feature is in an “an early visibility program with select customers,” according to the press release, “and is expected to be generally available in late 2025.”

What is MBD? There are many bickering definitions for this engineering acronym, but when it stands for model-based definition it refers to annotating a 3D model with manufacturing data such as materials, dimensions, tolerances and the like. It’s an alternative to the standard 2D drawings that everyone loves to hate (but that don’t seem to be going away anytime soon).

“Our new MBD capabilities remove the need to interpret 2D drawings by embedding PMI [product manufacturing information] directly into the 3D model,” David Katzman, PTC’s general manager of Onshape and Arena, said in the release. “And because Onshape is cloud-native, this information is instantly accessible to everyone who needs it, from any device and any location. It’s a major step forward in making MBD practical and scalable for real-world use.”

PTC is showing off Onshape’s MBD this week at the Paris Air Show with their customer Aura Aero (June 16 – 19 2025, Zone B4). Check it out if you’re in town (but you might want to stay away from the Louvre).

Design and Simulation Week 2025

If you’re not already counting down the days to Engineering.com’s annual Design and Simulation week, here’s your 27-day warning.

Running from July 14 – 18, 2025, this series of expert webinars will explore the top trends in engineering software from some of the leading voices in the industry (and me). You’ll learn about AI, automation, multiphysics and how to make the most of modern tools.

Register for Design and Simulation Week now and start counting.

One last link

DiffusionRenderer is a pretty cool new AI-based rendering tool from Nvidia. It takes a 2D video and strips out the geometry and material info in order to plug in different lighting conditions, like changing a scene from day to night. In addition to its creative applications, Nvidia says it’ll help generate synthetic data for robotics training and autonomous vehicle development.

Got news, tips, comments, or complaints? Send them my way: malba@wtwhmedia.com.

The post Duro reboots its PLM platform for AI appeared first on Engineering.com.

PTC launched the latest version of its flagship CAD software, Creo 12. The update brings “hundreds of powerful enhancements to its design, simulation, and manufacturing capabilities,” according to PTC.

Creo 12 enhances the user interface, including adding feature presets that allow users to set their own defaults; composite structure design, including the ability to generate a solid geometry from composite layers; electrical design, including the ability to work on a harness as an assembly; model-based definition (MBD), including enhanced file export to STEP AP242; and more.

Creo+, the SaaS version of Creo, was also updated last month (it gets a new release quarterly). You can watch a PTC webinar on everything new in Creo 12 and Creo+ here.

Digging into Designcenter

Last week I wrote from Siemens Realize Live Americas 2025 in Detroit. I noted the introduction of Siemens Designcenter, “which as far as I can tell is just a new way of referring to Solid Edge and NX.”

Well, I was half right. But there’s more to the story, so if you use either of those programs (or want to learn about an interesting break from CAD industry norms) check out What is Siemens Designcenter?

nTop and SimScale team up for heat exchanger simulation

A new partnership between SimScale and nTop promises to unlock “unprecedented speed and robustness in the simulation and design exploration of high-performance heat exchangers.”

The software developers announced a new integration that allows engineers to import implicit geometry representations from nTop into SimScale. There, they can run flow and conjugate heat transfer simulations directly on the implicit geometry with SimScale’s immersed boundary method (IBM).

“Traditional CAD-to-simulation workflows have always been a major bottleneck in high-performance heat exchanger design—you’re constantly dealing with meshing failures and geometry conversion issues that kill iteration speed,” said Bradley Rothenberg, CEO of nTop, in the announcement. “This native integration with SimScale eliminates that friction—Engineers can now move directly from nTop implicit geometry into a robust thermal and flow solver without the preprocessing headaches, enabling teams to iterate faster and explore design spaces that were previously impractical to simulate.”

This isn’t nTop’s first geometry-to-cloud-based-simulation-pipeline partnership. In March nTop announced a collaboration with Luminary Cloud (and Nvidia) that would take nTop data directly to the simulation platform (and beyond, to Nvidia’s PhysicsNeMo for AI training).

Sketch Helper gets an update

Hestus, developer of the Sketch Helper tool for Autodesk Fusion, has updated said tool to be “up to 3x more responsive,” according to the v0.7.0 release notes.

If you don’t know Hestus or Sketch Helper, I wrote about them back in April when they were hosting a hackathon in San Francisco. Sketch Helper automatically applies constraints to sketches in Fusion (a bit like Autodesk’s own Sketch AutoConstrain tool). With the update, “Sketch Helper now generates recommendations in the background and without interrupting your workflow.”

When I tested it in April, Sketch Helper generated constraint recommendations in real-time—it’s one of the reasons CEO Sohrab Haghighat told me he believes his tool is superior to Autodesk’s Sketch AutoConstrain, which suggests constraints only when users click a button. Given that, I asked Haghighat to clarify the nature of the update.

“Sketch Helper always generated recommendations on the fly. But in bigger sketches where we can propose more recommendations, the computation could cause a momentary interruption in the user’s interaction. This update will resolve that issue by making each group of recommendations available to the user as soon as possible and not causing any interruption for the user,” he wrote in an email.

So there you have it. By the way, Hestus is currently looking for Fusion users to provide feedback on some new features in development—if you’re interested, reach out to Haghighat at sohrab@hestus.co.

Quick hits

• Chinese developer ZWSoft has released ZWCAD MFG 2026, the latest version of its mechanical design software. (If you remember reading about this already, you’re thinking of the beta release in April.)
• Vectorworks, part of the Nemetschek Group, launched a preview of a new AI assistant that will answer users’ Vectorworks questions. (If you remember reading about this already, you’re thinking of the AI assistant in Nemetschek’s Allplan and Graphisoft.)
• CoreTechnologie has teamed up with Leo AI to enable “advanced AI-powered analysis of CADx data on the Leo AI platform through CoreTechnologie’s embedded software development kit (SDK) 3D_Kernel_IO.” (If you remember 3D_Kernel_IO, it was just updated. I haven’t covered Leo AI before, so if you use it or make it, I’d like to hear from you.)

One last link

What do you do with all your old software when you’re trying to modernize? Manufacturing engineer Andrei-Lucian Rosca explains on Engineering.com: Dealing with legacy software during a digital overhaul.

Got news, tips, comments, or complaints? Send them my way: malba@wtwhmedia.com.

The post PTC launches Creo 12 appeared first on Engineering.com.

In addition, engineers increasingly need to run multiphysics simulations that combine structural, thermal, and fluid dynamics effects, adding further computational demands. Evaluating multiple design variations and running detailed optimization studies within tight deadlines only amplifies the pressure.

This is where modern high-performance computing (HPC) becomes essential. By providing the processing power and scalability required for faster and more advanced simulations, HPC enables engineers to tackle larger, more detailed models with greater confidence. It unlocks the ability to explore more design scenarios, run complex analyses, and iterate rapidly — accelerating time to insight and ultimately time to market.

Even better, today’s HPC solutions are becoming more accessible and easier to integrate, empowering more engineering teams to overcome simulation bottlenecks and drive innovation forward.

Your download is sponsored by Ansys.

The post Best Practices and HPC Strategies for Ansys Mechanical appeared first on Engineering.com.

First announced at CES 2025 in January and reintroduced at the Siemens Realize Live 2025 user conference in June, Designcenter is the new name for Siemens’ portfolio of mechanical design software. It goes beyond branding—the new moniker comes with increasing interoperability and “aggressive” new pricing that Siemens believes will serve everyone from a single-person design startup to a major enterprise OEM.

Engineering.com dug into Designcenter to find out what it is, what it isn’t, and what it means for Siemens users.

The origins of Siemens Designcenter

All the major CAD developers have dual offerings: a premium CAD program for large enterprises and a more affordable option for the mass market. Dassault Systèmes has Catia and Solidworks, PTC has Creo and Onshape, Autodesk has Inventor and Fusion, and Siemens has NX and Solid Edge.

Siemens has something else, too: Parasolid, the modeling kernel that they use in both NX and Solid Edge and license to several competitors (including Solidworks and Onshape), and D-Cubed, Siemens’ geometric constraint manager, also used in-house and licensed to competitors. You could call these components the heart of CAD software.

With both NX and Solid Edge built on the same underlying technology, Siemens saw an opportunity for closer integration.

“Our overall move for Designcenter is to try to take a more aggressive position in the marketplace, as one offering, and not be seen as a split offering between NX and Solid Edge,” George Rendell, VP of NX Design at Siemens, said in a presentation at Realize Live 2025. “Based on the same technology and the same solid modeling kernel, Parasolid, we can scale and flow the data… from single seat customers to large enterprises.”

As Siemens’ mechanical design brand, Designcenter slots in neatly next to Siemens Teamcenter (for PLM), Simcenter (for simulation), and Opcenter (for manufacturing operations management). Siemens’ executive vice president of PLM products, Joe Bohman, hinted at Realize Live 2025 that more Siemens “center” brands may be coming soon (Lifecenter, perhaps?).

What does Siemens Designcenter mean for NX and Solid Edge?

Siemens NX and Siemens Solid Edge aren’t going anywhere—yet. Both products exist as part of the Designcenter portfolio. Siemens hasn’t announced any specific plans to phase out those brands, but Rendell revealed that, at some point, Designcenter will be the name of Siemens’ CAD software.

“For those of you who still call NX Unigraphics… I think you can see where this is headed,” he said to a chuckling audience (clearly many of them remembered that name change from 2002). “Over time, we will slowly stop using the NX product name.”

Presumably, the same is true of Solid Edge—it would defeat the purpose to phase out one brand but not the other.

What’s available in Siemens Designcenter?

For now, Designcenter includes all of the Solid Edge and NX product offerings, including the software-as-a-service (SaaS) versions labeled with an X. It will offer the same four tiers that NX X does: Essentials, Standard, Advanced, and Premium. (NX X Essentials is a browser-based version of NX formerly called Zel X and the latter three tiers used to be known as NX Mach 1, 2, and 3).

Since the X products are all licensed per user, these tiers can be mixed and matched within an organization, Rendell said, with Parasolid ensuring seamless data flow no matter the tier. The browser-based Essentials tier will be included with higher tiers, meaning all Designcenter users can access their data through the web and on mobile devices.

On top of these tiers, Siemens offers more than 100 add-on modules through its value-based licensing program. The token-based system includes modules for generative design, manufacturing, simulation, sustainability and more.

Who is Designcenter for?

Siemens sees Designcenter as a solution for every engineering company, no matter the size, industry, or workflow. Designcenter can be tailored to each company’s needs and it will evolve alongside them, according to Brian Grogan, director of product management for Siemens’ mainstream engineering software group.

“We have a lot of small companies that want to buy the right size product at the right size price point today, but be assured that as they grow as an organization and they achieve more design complexity, that they can scale up in the portfolio without having to worry about the boundaries of the products,” Grogan told Engineering.com.

What will Designcenter cost?

Here are the current prices for Solid Edge X and NX X:

Siemens didn’t announce any specific price changes coming to Designcenter, but Rendell emphasized that more accessible pricing is one of the reasons for the rebrand.

“The feedback we have at Siemens is that sometimes we’re a little hard to do business with, sometimes we’re a little bit expensive,” Rendell said. “So part of our focus here on a scalable message is to be more aggressive at price point.”

There have been a lot of name changes at Siemens recently, and likely more to come with the company’s increased focus on acquisitions. Designcenter, at least, is a change towards harmony. While veteran users may bristle (the same ones who still call NX Unigraphics 23 years later), one thing is undeniable: it’s a lot better than SE X.

The post What is Siemens Designcenter? appeared first on Engineering.com.

This week I’m in Detroit for Realize Live Americas 2025, Siemens’ annual user conference. Siemens Digital Industries Software CEO Tony Hemmelgarn gave the opening keynote yesterday to more than 2,500 attendees at the Huntington Place Convention Center. He kicked off the conference with that famous Heraclitus quote—“No man steps in the same river twice”—before expounding on the Greek philosopher’s lesser known views on digital transformation and the Xcelerator portfolio.

Hemmelgarn’s keynote gave a high level tour of Siemens’ products and plans. He pointed out AI copilots in Teamcenter and NX CAM, discussed immersive engineering with Teamcenter Digital Reality Viewer, gave some love to recent acquisition Altair and acquisition-in-progress Dotmatics, and showed off deluxe customers including Rolls Royce.

Today’s keynote, headlined by Siemens executive vice president of PLM products Joe Bohman, continued that tour. Bohman talked about BOMs (a favorite subject of his), design space exploration with Simcenter HEEDS, electrical design with Siemens Capital, requirements management with Polarion and more. He also announced that Siemens is developing an “industrial foundation model” to train AI in the language of engineering and manufacturing, but we didn’t get many details on that.

Bohman previewed a couple interesting upcoming features for Xcelerator: one, a new personalized home screen for all users to simplify onboarding, and two, embedded AI agents to which users can assign a task at the click of a button. Oh, and he introduced something called Siemens Designcenter, which as far as I can tell is just a new way of referring to Solid Edge and NX.

One more NX goodie: in the NX CAD keynote by Bob Haubrock, senior vice president of product engineering software, we learned that the upcoming 2506 release will allow multiple NX users to work on the same part or assembly at the same time, with live updates between them à la Google Docs.

More to come as I hunt down details in Detroit. If you’re at the show and want to say hi, you can find me by the coffee (or send me an email at malba@wtwhmedia.com).

Arcol launches “Figma for BIM”

Another cloud competitor has entered the building information modeling (BIM) arena. Arcol, a New York-based startup founded in 2021, has launched its web-based platform for architecture, engineering and construction (AEC).

Arcol wants to “bring the magic back to building design,” according to Paul O’Carroll, founder and CEO, in the company’s announcement.

By magic, O’Carroll means an intuitive, playful interface and a web-first workflow that averts versions, foregoes files, and eliminates emails and exports. O’Carroll wants Arcol to be the Figma for BIM (and Figma CEO Dylan Field happens to be an Arcol investor, so the inspiration runs both ways).

So what can it do? Arcol offers real-time collaboration (supporting multiple users and commenting), geometric modeling tools (with familiar sketch and extrude operations), automatic data calculations (live updates of square footage, unit counts, parking, costs, etc.), and a presentation workspace called Boards that synchs with everything else.

Arcol’s data can be exported in the expected ways—STL, CSV, JPG—but there’s also a beta to export models to Autodesk Revit through an add-in. A company spokesperson told me that Arcol will soon support additional BIM platforms as well.

At the moment, Arcol is a conceptual design platform. But the startup plans to go much further in the AEC workflow. Its roadmap includes schematic design, design development and eventually construction documentation.

Arcol is now generally available following a preview release for select firms. The platform starts at $100 per user per month, though enterprise pricing is also available.

So… anyone else feeling déjà vu?

Everything about Arcol reminds me of Motif, another web-based BIM platform that launched in March. Both platforms are taking aim at what they see as the outdated BIM goliath (cough, Revit). Both are explicitly taking cues from Figma and similar web-based tools. Both are coming out of the gate with a focus on conceptual design and real-time collaboration. Both have a synchronized presentation workspace (Motif’s is called Frames). Both have an add-on to send data directly to Revit (though Motif’s is bidirectional, while Arcol’s appears to be one-way). Both are planning more BIM add-ons soon (Motif currently supports Rhino as well as Revit).

And, most interestingly, both have Amar Hanspal, former co-CEO of Autodesk. He was an early investor in Arcol and is now the CEO of Motif. What’s that story, I wonder?

I asked O’Carroll about Hanspal over email, and I’ll quote his deft reply in full:

“Amar was an early angel investor in Arcol and later started Motif, which was unexpected. He is no longer involved in Arcol. But Motif’s entry into the space is just further proof that the industry is really hungry for innovation — it validates our market opportunity. We are confident we are delivering the best experience for today’s designers, and we’ll keep raising the bar for building design. Others will have to answer for themselves.”

Quick hits

• IMSI Design has released TurboCAD 2025, claiming more than 70 updates to the latest version of the CAD software. Those updates include performance boosts, interface improvements, and “AI-driven tools to enhance rendering workflows, provide design insights, and facilitate part creation” in the form of the optional TurboCAD Copilot Professional plug-in.
• 3D software developer CoreTechnologie has updated its 3D_Kernel_IO SDK for CAD conversion. The SDK now supports the latest formats for Catia V5, Solidworks, NX, Creo and more.
• Siemens Digital Industries Software announced two new offerings of its PCB design software, Xpedition, to cater to small and medium businesses. PADS Pro Essentials is a basic version of the software for $999/year and Xpedition Standard is for intermediate users at $2,999/year. Based on the clashing names, it seems Siemens is doing a bit of portfolio spring cleaning. Siemens notes on the Xpedition landing page that “PADS Standard, PADS Standard Plus, PADS Professional and PADS Professional Premium are still current products in our portfolio,” and that users can contact the company for additional seats.

One last link

CIMdata’s Peter Bilello, an Engineering.com contributor and fellow Realize Live attendee (hi Peter!), with In the rush to digital transformation, it might be time for a rethink.

Got news, tips, comments, or complaints? Send them my way: malba@wtwhmedia.com.

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Sometimes I worry that I’m going to run out of AI startups to write about. Thankfully, they keep popping up like heads on a Hydra. Today I draw my pen on Toolpath, an AI startup focused on CAM automation.

“We’ve built an AI engine to remove the things users do in CAM software today,” Toolpath CEO Al Whatmough told me.

Namely: Toolpath automates toolpath creation.

In a manual CAM workflow, Whatmough explained, users specify their toolpaths tool by tool and setup by setup. It requires know-how and patience. Even for a simple part, generating a toolpath could take an experienced user 30 minutes or more.

Toolpath does the whole thing for you in a couple minutes.

It works like this: Users upload their CAD part to Toolpath’s browser-based interface. Toolpath’s AI, with knowledge of the user’s available set of tools, generates a full 3-axis milling strategy along with a cost and cycle time estimate.

“A part that’s manufacturable for one person is not manufacturable for another. And so this looks a lot like DFM [design for manufacturability], but it’s not really. It’s DFM that’s specific to the context of the capabilities a given shop,” Whatmough said.

If a part can’t be machined with the user’s existing tools, Toolpath will suggest some from a database of “tens of thousands” of tools from different vendors, according to Whatmough.

Whatmough showed me a brief demo of the AI platform in action. He pulled in a part (the bike clamp top shown above), and without doing anything else Toolpath began analyzing it. About a minute later, it had generated the full machining strategy, with four setups and six tools from Whatmough’s library, with a cost estimate of $176.95.

A toolpath is just that, and to turn it into a real-world part you still need a CAM system to simulate it and generate the CNC machine code. Toolpath lets you send the generated toolpath directly to Autodesk Fusion, where users can take it to production in the Fusion CAM workspace. In the demo, Whatmough imported the bike clamp’s machining strategy into Fusion by copying and pasting a key into the Toolpath add-on, which recreated the setups natively in Fusion.

Whatmough knows Fusion CAM well—he was Autodesk’s director of product management for manufacturing until he left in 2021. But there’s nothing about Toolpath that requires Fusion, he said, and Toolpath plans to support other CAM systems too. Eventually, it may outgrow them entirely.

“When we’ve done our job right, we will have a closed loop system that goes the whole way to the machine,” Whatmough said.

Toolpath is already raising eyebrows and capital in the CAM world. Whatmough says the platform has a couple hundred paying subscribers (the base subscription is $1,500 per year), and last week it closed its latest investment round with funds from toolmaker Kennametal, CAM developer ModuleWorks, and venture capitalist firm Leaders Fund. Toolpath didn’t disclose the value of this round, but to date the company has raised approximately $20 million USD across three rounds, according to a company spokesperson.

I found this particular head of the AI Hydra to be less hyperbolic than most. Toolpath is focused on automating something with reproducible steps and a clear solution. Whatmough says the AI is trained to “play the game of machining a part, similar to the way you train an AI to play the game of chess.”

A chess-bot might make a bad move, but it won’t ever make an illegal move, and likewise Whatmough says the Toolpath AI won’t hallucinate. “It’s a more explicit [AI]… you have to remove all the geometry of this part, and these are the tools you get to use. It’s how I do it as a programmer today.”

I was impressed with Whatmough’s demo, but I always take demos with a grain of salt. The end users get the final say, so if you’re one of them, please share your thoughts on Toolpath in the comments or message me directly at malba@wtwhmedia.com.

Quick hits

• Siemens Digital Industries Software has entered into an agreement to acquire Excellicon, an EDA software developer focused on developing, verifying and managing timing constraints. Siemens didn’t disclose the terms of the deal.
• AMD announced new GPUs and CPUs at Computex 2025 in Taipei last week. They include the Radeon RX 9060 XT and Radeon AI PRO R9700 graphics cards and Ryzen Threadripper 9000 Series processors.
• Reality capture company XGrids announced a new plugin for Autodesk Revit that integrates XGrids’ Lixel CyberColor (LCC) technology with the popular BIM platform. LCC combines lidar data with 3D Gaussian splatting and “automatically generates spatial models that capture both visual fidelity and structural accuracy,” according to the XGrids press release. LCC for Revit will be available on the Autodesk app store by the end of May 2025.

One last link

Engineering.com senior editor Ian Wright writes about his latest obsession in I love lattices.

Got news, tips, comments, or complaints? Send them my way: malba@wtwhmedia.com.

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Today’s top story comes from Maxon, developer of the rendering app Redshift and 3D modeling and animation software Cinema 4D, among others.

Maxon announced last week that it’s on a mission to improve architectural visualization. How? With a series of new plugins for real-time rendering in popular BIM platforms, starting with Vectorworks.

“Maxon is obviously a leading 3D software provider, mostly in broadcast, motion graphics, game and visual effects,” Maxon CEO David McGavran told me. “We also have quite a large amount of high-end architectural visualization artists as customers. And so with that, we’ll be expanding our solutions that we bring to market, and we’ll be talking about it for the first time in June with one of our sister companies, Vectorworks, at AIA.”

That’s the AIA Conference on Architecture & Design 2025, which will take place in Boston from June 5 – 6. Maxon and Vectorworks, both subsidiaries of the Nemetschek Group, will be showing a demo of the new plugin at booth 563.

There’s more to come. McGavran said Maxon is planning to develop plugins for other popular BIM platforms after Vectorworks.

For more details from my interview with McGavran, read Maxon to release Vectorworks plugin for real-time BIM rendering.

The Engineering $alary $urvey

Engineering.com has released the results of its 2025 Engineering Salary Survey, conducted in partnership with our sister publications Design World, EE World, Fluid Power World, The Robot Report, Medical Design & Outsourcing, and R&D World.

“With data gathered from nearly 600 full-time engineers, this survey reveals more than just salary figures. It explores benefits preferences, vacation norms, job roles, and career trajectories, offering a detailed snapshot of the professional engineering landscape,” wrote editorial director Paul J. Heney in his announcement of the report on Engineering.com.

You can download the full report here.

The nTop Computational Design Summit

Software developer nTop has announced its 2025 Computational Design Summit (nCDS), set for June 24, 2025 in Los Angeles. It’s a one-day event featuring speakers from Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Siemens and more.

“nCDS is an opportunity to showcase how computational design and AI are changing the way products are developed and brought to market—helping engineers shorten design cycles, improve performance, and meet increasingly complex requirements,” Bradley Rothenberg, nTop founder and CEO, said in the company’s announcement.

If you’re nTerested in nCDS, you can register here.

A P-1 AI update

A few weeks back I covered P-1 AI, a startup working on engineering artificial general intelligence (AGI). I still can’t tell if the whole thing is a joke or not.

There’s some more evidence for not with a new demo video from cofounder Aleksa Gordić, in which he shows Archie (the name of P-1 AI’s agent) helping design a residential cooling system. It’s not a particularly convincing demo, but at least it’s more than we got with the Archie demo hype reel from the company’s launch.

On the other hand, there’s also more evidence that P-1 is just putting one on. Not only does the new demo continue to propagate the preposterous claim that P-1 AI is working to build Dyson spheres (in addition to more boring things, like HVAC prisms), but the startup has released a new, even more terrible promo video called Archie biopic, in which “Archie” “narrates” “his” “life” over AI generated images culminating in, you guessed it, a Dyson sphere.

If P-1 AI is genuine, the irony is rich. Even as the startup ostensibly works to replace human engineers, it’s in full recruitment mode, putting out calls for “cracked engineers” to join the team (and crack themselves right out of a job).

One last link

Here’s a revealing look at the state of generative AI from R&D World editor-in-chief Brian Buntz: 8 reasons all is not well in GenAI land.

Got news, tips, comments, or complaints? Send them my way: malba@wtwhmedia.com.

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