Editor’s Pick: Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 4.0 Simplifies the Design Process

By Jonathan Gourlay

Dear Desktop Engineering Reader:

PTC’s annual media and analyst event at its headquarters in Needham,MA, is a great opportunity for non-engineers like me to gain more perspective on the designer’s task. I took that opportunity last week when Mike Campbell, senior vice president of product development, took the wraps off Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 4.0. It’s loaded with enhancements, improvements, and new capabilities.

A result of more than $100 million in research and development investment,  Wildfire 4.0 uses 6.6 percent less memory and improves your system performance. It enables faster completion of rote tasks like adding rounds and fillets,  faster retrieval of large assemblies, faster creation of electromechanical designs using automated capabilities for adding and routing ribbon cables, and faster direct editing and smoothing of surfaces.

Aside from timesaving enhancements, the package also includes a new ECAD-MCAD Collaboration Extension. It’s a slick electromechanical capability that enables MCAD and ECAD designers to view their environments side by side, leading to better, and yes, faster collaboration.
 
That last capability is just one of many that Campbell highlighted during the launch of Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 4.0. There are many more worth exploring, like the new intellectual property protection module, updated data exchange processors (including new support for JT), new analysis support, and more. You can read more about these cool features by going directly to this week’s write-up here.

All the best,

Jonathan Gourlay
Features Editor, Desktop Engineering