An experimental authoring system for CAD applications

Writing software for interactive CAD systems is costly, inflexible and difficult- It requires many man years to develop a fool free interactive system because the dialog between the user and the system is very conplex. Authoring systems reduce the investment needed to produce applications by providing a set of tools suited to the domain of those applications. This thesis investigates how an engineering workstation, the Unix environment and an engineering database system can be combined to create an authoring system for CAD applications. The terra authoring system for CAD application is used in this thesis to mean a system for development of CAD applications. The investigation was performed by implementing a simple integrated circuit layout application.

Engineering workstations are powerful single user computers. A typical station will have its own mass storage device, a high speed interface to other stations and a medium resolution graphics screen. Unix is an operating system which allows programs that were written independently to communicate using pipes, filters and mailboxes- An engineering database system provides a set of tools for creating, maintaining and mutating the data in a CAD application. A system which combines these tools should considerably reduce the software investment needed to produce a CAD application.