The Barrier of CAD File Formats

CAD designers are some of the biggest victims of silo-ed information. Their dilemma is that while software tools continue to grow in sophistication and complexity, the ability to exchange that data with colleagues and partners can be challenging.

A study taken by Adobe of 407 design and manufacturing professionals found that 90 percent of them collaborate with others within their company and that 33 percent collaborate with customers or supply chain partners.

High-end, specialized CAD software design packages can be very expensive. If recipients of CAD data files don’t have view or authoring software for that type of data, they’re not able to view it.

There is also the problem of size. CAD files often encompass very complex designs and can grow in size to tens of megabytes. In this age of YouTube and Flickr, these sizes may seem small, but the sizes of these files is often an impediment when trying to send files over the company network.

Various solutions to the CAD data exchange problem have grown over the years. Sometimes free or lower-cost viewers are available that allow people receiving the files to be able to open and see the some or all of the data capabilities in the files received. Other options are to convert the files or to export the data into a ‘neutral file format’.

There are a number of popular intermediate file formats used for data exchange. The drawback of a neutral file format is that it typically addresses lowest-common-denominator feature sets of CAD systems. Specialized or sophisticated capabilities available only from a single vendor are lost when moved to a less-capable software package for viewing.

* IGES allows exchange of product data models in the form of circuit diagrams, wireframe, freeform surface or solid modeling representations.
Applications supported by IGES include traditional engineering drawings, models for analysis, and other manufacturing functions.
• STEP (Standard for the Exchange of Product model data) is an ISO standard that now provides a better mechanism for exchanging 3D data.
• Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) gives you a faceted model representation but is not good for tasks involving high accuracy
• JT common data format for PLM data exchange can reduce the size of CAD data by as much as 75 to 90 percent
• Acrobat 3D can store any CAD/CAM file into a PDF file that originated from almost any CAD program and can view the data, see metadata and make annotations on the file.