Parametric Technology Corporation (NASDAQ: PMTC) announced today that Release 16.0 of its Pro/ENGINEER family of software products will ship to customers this week.

The new release incorporates a greater level of integration between Pro/ENGINEER and PTC's industrial design and design optimization software products, providing customers with unprecedented control over the form, fit and function of the mechanical products they are developing.

According to Marc Dulude, senior vice president of marketing for Parametric Technology, "The ability to design a product in 3D is not enough today. Mechanical engineers also need to know up front how a product will look and perform; and their ability to balance the goals of form, fit and function is essential. With Release 16.0, we have integrated PTC's industrial design and design optimization products with the Pro/ENGINEER product family to provide our customers with the industry's first analytical prototyping toolset encompassing product concept through manufacturing. Now customers can leverage the synergies from these three product families to design better products, faster and more effectively."

Featuring more than 500 customer-driven enhancements and five new application modules, Pro/ENGINEER Release 16.0 focuses on four key themes: integration, ease of use, manufacturing, and transforming legacy engineering data into valuable information.

Integration

PTC's newly acquired industrial design and design optimization software products have been rapidly integrated with the Pro/ENGINEER product family. Embedding the Pro/PHOTORENDER module within Pro/ENGINEER, for example, enables the user to create high-quality photorealistic images within the Pro/ENGINEER environment.

An enhanced level of integration enables the user to directly access Pro/MECHANICA structural functionality from within the Pro/ENGINEER environment, then apply loads, boundary conditions, material properties, and design variables to the Pro/ENGINEER model. Through PTC's direct parameter integration (DPI) technology, the user can also designate one or more parameters in the Pro/ENGINEER environment -- such as shape or weight -- which may be brought into Pro/MECHANICA and modified until an optimal solution is reached.

Ease of Use

Release 16.0 enhances productivity and significantly expands ease of use across the Pro/ENGINEER family of software products with the introduction of dialog boxes to the core Pro/ENGINEER user interface. Dialog box technology has been implemented in many strategic areas within Pro/ENGINEER including the option driven user interface for the creation and redefinition of features, in Pro/DETAIL for creating geometric tolerances, text attributes, and line attributes, and in Pro/MANUFACTURING for controlling low level tool motions.

User productivity has been further extended through significantly enhanced system performance for the retrieval and manipulation of Pro/ENGINEER drawings and assemblies. This allows the user to retrieve a drawing for viewing purposes without having to retrieve related objects. Pro/ASSEMBLY has been enhanced to further extend PTC's technological lead in large assembly management. Pro/ASSEMBLY's advanced assembly management tools provide considerable reduction in the time and system resources required to retrieve and manipulate large, complex assemblies.

Release 16.0 includes significant enhancements in the sketcher functionality of Pro/ENGINEER, providing the user with control over assumptions that have been used by the system to regenerate a sketch. With the addition of 3D sketcher capability, the user can now easily visualize the location of a sketch on the 3D model. In addition, new capabilities for "dynamic dimension modification" allow the user to quickly modify the sketch by using mouse-controlled "click and drag" functionality. These enhancements ensure a highly productive, easy-to-use sketching environment.

Manufacturing

Through an agreement with ICAM Technologies Corp., the industry leader in post- processing technology, PTC has integrated ICAM's CAM-POST product into its own suite of manufacturing-related software applications. Five new application modules now provide a fully integrated link between the Pro/MANUFACTURING family of products and computer numerically controlled (CNC) machine tools. These include Pro/NCPOST-MILL, Pro/NCPOST-TURN, Pro/NCPOST-WEDM, Pro/NCPOST- ADVANCED, and Pro/NCPOST-SHEETMETAL.

The Pro/MANUFACTURING product offering has also been expanded into four modules to be more representative of the end user's CAM requirements: Pro/MFG- MILL, designed for 3-axis milling with positioning; Pro/MFG-TURN, designed for 2-4 axis turning; Pro/MFG-WEDM, designed for 2-4 axis wire EDM; and Pro/MFG- ADVANCED, which includes the functionality of the preceding modules and extends to 4 and 5-axis milling and mill/turn. Each of these manufacturing modules includes a run-time post processor. The repackaging enables customers to select only the functionalities that are pertinent to their particular operations.