Silicon Graphics

Validation with Confidence

Maybe you're moving toward digital virtual prototyping for design analysis. Or you're interested in seeing a working 3D model of your product design before you commit to materials specs. Perhaps you want to investigate the vibrational forces at work on a component. Or maybe you just want to plan a simpler maintenance access solution through a chassis assembly. Whether it's visual verification or compute-intensive numerical analysis, SiliconWorks is the validation environment to use.

Its strength in 3D modeling gives you the advantage of sharing digital mock-ups with downstream groups to get early design feedback through concurrent engineering. More people participate in a project at an earlier stage, where they can identify and correct potential problems before they occur.

By implementing a parallel development process, you improve your product quality, time to market, and competitiveness.

With SiliconWorks hardware systems and hundreds of software applications, you can replace physical prototypes with 3D digital mock-ups that simulate performance characteristics of complex systems. SiliconWorks has been used to digitally prototype everything from sports watches to commercial jetliners.

No longer a textbook theory, digital models are now practical. They illustrate and verify important considerations, such as customer usage, human factors, manufacturing specifications, assembly difficulties, and maintenance problems. The results are significant:

Automotive engineers apply usability testing through digital models to determine end user reaction to design features and ergonomic layout, saving time and money.
Design engineers create a digital model of an entire aircraft for fit-and-function walk-throughs on a single Silicon Graphics OnyxTM RealityEngine2(tm) graphics supercomputer-instead of building a physical prototype.
Manufacturing engineers model a product's complete manufacturing and assembly process in a virtual environment before the factory floor is laid out, and at the same time, improve the design's manufacturability. Feedback includes tracking the impact and cost of the design change through manufacturing.
Usability engineers use kinematic and dynamic models of humans to determine if maintenance technicians can access and service any component, then use those models to train field technicians.

All of this is not only possible, but cost effective, with systems that allow you to simulate response characteristics, quickly change design parameters, and see the behavior of each design option in real time.

But that's only the visual aspect of validation with SiliconWorks. Compute-intensive applications are solving even tougher problems:

Design engineers evaluate ship hull variations using hydrodynamic and structural analyses on Silicon Graphics computers to determine stress and deformation from wave impact.
Automotive engineers use Silicon Graphics computer systems for numerical simulation of automobile impact analyses aimed at replacing multimillion dollar crash testing.
Scientists use SiliconWorks to calculate solutions to complex computational fluid dynamics (CFD) problems-from air flow over a wing to blood flow through an artificial heart.

The numerical solutions performed on Silicon Graphics workstations and servers have replaced much of the number-crunching previously done on mainframes and supercomputers. Scientists claim SiliconGraphics POWER CHALLENGETM parallel processing systems provide more interactivity, available memory, and memory bus speed than traditional supercomputers.

No other systems are architected to validate designs as quickly and accurately as Silicon Graphics systems. That's SiliconWorks unique degree of confidence at work.

SiliconWorks: What it's all about