ACE Translator 2008 offers the CAD Translator market with an all-in-one product

Numerical Innovations, LLC (NI) recently launched its ACE (Advanced CAD Exchange) Translator 2008. The product has been chosen for a brief analysis here because of its revolutionary nature.

There is a significant number of EDA designers who require the use of mechanical CAD tools (such as AutoCAD, SolidWorks, and ProEngineer) to layout custom designs which contain geometries that have not traditionally been the focus of today’s mainstream layout tools; for example, arcs, curves, circles, and other multi-polygonic shapes. A problem occurs when translating from CAD to EDA formats (such as Gerber, GDSII, etc.) for generation of high-resolution masks, and other tooling. Undetected flaws during the translation including poor arc quality, polygons not filled, “void” areas missing, etc. can cause an entire design flow to come to a halt. The ACE Translator 2008 seamlessly bridges this gap with an all-in-one concept that includes specialized conversion, repair, and viewing features built-in to simplify, improve, and verify the entire process of getting accurate masks from CAD data. It is claimed to be all-in-one conversion, repair, and viewing system that provides everything the designer needs to safely get from CAD to mask. Purchasing multiple translators, editors, and viewers introduces the potential for additional interoperability issues between those tools, plus it takes longer to learn how to use each tool respectively and the overall expense and maintenance contracts for all these tools combined can cost thousands of dollars. It is the solution to problems arising out of these issues.

Moreover, the ACE Translator 2008 bi-directionally translates a wide variety formats including: DXF (AutoCAD 2008 compatible), GDS-II, OASIS, Gerber (RS-274X/Fire9000), ODB++, Postscript, Image files (TIFF, BMP, JPEG), IGES, and more. It includes many customized repair features to handle any geometrical situation, such as: AutoJoin which instantly connects and closes open boundaries segments and eliminates overlapping polygons; Polygon De-Embedding automatically solves the polygon-inside-of-polygon problem; a Boolean engine to easily create new polygons from arbitrary geometries, and much more. It also provides a WYSIWYG built-in Viewer and is available on multiple platforms including: Windows and Linux.