News

PTC Introduces Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 4.0 With New Industry Leading Capabilities To Drive Process Improvements

New Release Includes Enhancements that Support Electromechanical Design, Detailed Design, and Design Outsourcing Processes

NEEDHAM, MA. – January 16, 2008 – PTC (Nasdaq: PMTC), The Product Development Company®, today announced the availability of Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 4.0, a major release of its integrated 3D CAD/CAM/CAE software and a key component of the PTC® Product Development System. With this release, PTC expands the industry’s most comprehensive parametric solution for product development teams, delivering new industry leading capabilities to help customers optimize key global and electromechanical design processes. Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 4.0 enables customers to create innovative, winning products with faster time-to-market, improved quality and reduced costs.

“Discrete manufacturers need a product development system that will help them compete in a fast-paced global environment. They must optimize their product development processes and adopt the latest design solutions that that will help them improve their efficiency, time-to-market, product quality and cost,” said Marc Halpern, research director at information technology research firm Gartner.

Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 4.0 offers powerful new capabilities and usability enhancements that optimize key global design processes and further improve personal and process productivity:

Detailed Design

• Innovative new Auto Round TM Technology — Saves valuable time with automated rounding of even the most complex features. A rounding task which took an expert user 20 minutes to complete was accomplished by Auto Round in 40 seconds!
• Improved Large Assembly Performance— Automated and optimized assembly file management using simplified representations reduces memory consumption by 40% and model retrieval times by 60%
• Enhanced 3D Drawings— Automatically displays dimensions in 3D drawings which increases design information reuse and delivers production ready drawings. Publishes and accesses saved 3D drawing views in PTC ProductView™
• Advancements in Surface Editing— Helps optimize designs with new capabilities for directly editing surfaces including multi-resolution editing and smoothing
• Faster Surface Removal— Quickly removes round and hole geometry to prepare designs for mold making or simplify designs for analysis. Reduces model editing time by up to 50%!
• New Pro/ENGINEER Tolerance Analysis Extension Powered by CETOL Technology—This new module quickly analyzes geometric tolerances and variances directly in the CAD model
• New Feature Recognition Tool—Quickly converts imported geometries to features in your model
• Enhanced Import DataDoctorTM —New data repair capabilities and easy-to-use, modernized user interface dramatically improves the ability to reuse legacy and 3rd party data
• Improved Data Exchange— New and upgraded processors allow customers to better leverage other CAD data (including new module Pro/ENGINEER Interface for JT), publish Pro/ENGINEER data in 3D PDFs, and import exact product representations from ProductView

Design Outsourcing

• New Pro/ENGINEER Rights Management Extension —This new module persistently and dynamically protects valuable design intellectual property (IP) enabling additional levels of security when collaborating across and beyond the enterprise

Verification and Validation

• Easier and Enhanced Simulation— Helps customers analyze designs faster and easier with smart diagnostics, improved meshing, better assembly connectivity management and analysis of results

Manufacturing Tooling and Factory Equipment Design

• Improved Usability— Simplifies and automates the transformation of engineering designs into manufacturing processes with an easy to use, powerful process manager for toolpath definition, annotation features, and other key capabilities

Electromechanical Design Enhancements

• New Ribbon Cabling—Creates electromechanical designs faster with intelligent, automated capabilities for adding and routing ribbon cables
• Faster Design Collaboration— New Pro/ENGINEER ECAD-MCAD Collaboration Extension accelerates electromechanical design with a new interface between MCAD and ECAD designs. Users can automatically identify incremental changes and cross-highlight between MCAD and ECAD board designs

“Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 4.0 provides numerous enhancements and resolutions to some key product development challenges,” said Frank Menendez, principle engineer, Alcon Research. “We have no doubt that the added functionality and increased flexibility of Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 4.0, coupled with the improvements we've seen in Windchill® PDMLink® 9.0, will assist us in continuing to improve product development processes at Alcon.”

“The improvements in electromechanical design capabilities will increase productivity at Daktronics,” states Jon Sprang, engineer, Daktronics. “Importing a complex design that used to take over three hours to complete we can now do in about 15 minutes with Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 4.0. Efficient ECAD-MCAD design collaboration is also an area that we have been struggling with. The new ECAD-MCAD collaboration capabilities will help us address these challenges.”

“The new capabilities in Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 4.0 focus on strengthening key processes that have the greatest impact on the success of a customer’s global development initiatives,” said James E. Heppelmann, executive vice president, software products, and chief product officer, PTC. “This release also underscores PTC’s continued emphasis on quality, usability and responsiveness to customer needs. By constantly evaluating our customers’ needs and the trends impacting the industry, PTC has made a significant investment in new capabilities for Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 4.0 that will continue to speed new product development in a globally dispersed environment.”

Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 4.0 Upgrades and Product Availability

Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 4.0 is scheduled to be available later this month.* Pro/ENGINEER active maintenance customers can conveniently download Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 4.0 or order a CD from the PTC support site under their current maintenance coverage. For more information on Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 4.0, please visit the Pro/ENGINEER product pages on www.ptc.com.

*The timing of any product release, including any features or functionality, is subject to change at PTC’s discretion.

About PTC

PTC (Nasdaq: PMTC) provides leading product lifecycle management (PLM), content management and dynamic publishing solutions to more than 50,000 companies worldwide. PTC customers include the world's most innovative companies in manufacturing, publishing, services, government and life sciences industries. PTC is included in the S&P Midcap 400 and Russell 2000 indices. For more information on PTC, please visit http://www.ptc.com.