Towards a Unified General Purpose Cad System at Cern

Several different CAD systems are in use at CERN today. Most of the 3D design work for the LHC is being done using Euclid from MDTVision. For 2D design work AutoCAD is widely used. Also, various special design tools exist for tasks such as electrical design and schematics. Even though the LHC design will be finished with Euclid, it has been clear since several years that a new 3D CAD system will be needed in the future. For this reason CERN carried out a comparison between the currently available 3D CAD software on the market using a set of selection criteria important for CERN. The selected system was CATIA from Dassault together with local data base system SmarTeam. The aim is to use CATIA as a multi-disciplinary general purpose CAD tool, which could eventually replace almost all of the other CAD systems at CERN. For this purpose, CATIA and SmarTeam are being integrated with the existing CAD utilities and database systems developed in-house. Pilot users are using the system for real designs while the digital mock-up features of CATIA are used in integration studies of LHC experiments. The feature list of CATIA and SmarTeam is impressive and experience with the software has so far been almost exclusively positive. This is promising for software with which CERN will likely have to live for the next 20 years or more.