From the planes Tufts students take into Boston, to the cell phones permanently attached to their ears, to the timers in the microwaves they use to heat up their dinners, Computer-Aided Design (CAD) technology plays a behind-the-scenes role in students' lives.
Outside of its ubiquitous presence in computer science classrooms, CAD technology, according to Associate Professor of Computer Science Soha Hassoun and other industry experts, will be the tiny factor driving a large and impending revolution in new technology.
CAD technology - a wide range of computer-based tools used to assist engineers, architects and other professionals in their design activities - operates behind the scenes. Rather than being featured in flashy new designs, it helps to create those new designs.
For example, CAD tools play a role in the development of intricate integrated circuits in laptops, phones, cars and stereos. CAD technology also aids in the development of massive 747 airplanes by enabling engineers to create detailed simulation and analysis of each component - as Civil and Environmental Engineering Senior Lecturer Lee Minardi knows firsthand.
"I worked on creating a CAD model of a T-38 fighter jet," said Minardi, who fell in love with CAD technology while a graduate student at Tufts (he graduated in 1969). "Every aircraft has a signature on radar. To find out what that signature is, so they can tell what plane they're looking at on radar, they can build a physical model and put it in a anechoic [soundproof] chamber and bombard it with radio waves."
Minardi, however, was involved in building a CAD model that rendered the physical one unnecessary. "I was involved creating a simulation so that they could do this on the computer," said the lecturer, who worked in the CAD industry for 18 years before coming to Tufts to teach in 1990.
Minardi has also used CAD technology to effectively communicate environmental concerns: He created a CAD representation of a seven-mile stretch of the PCB-contaminated Housatonic River in Western Massachusetts, complete with signposts indicating the levels of contamination in different areas of the river.
"It was a question of how to convey the extent of PCB contamination - the way the PCB moves, how it travels - to laypeople," Minardi said.
CAD technology itself is not new: "I've been working with CAD for 30 years," Minardi said. But because of what it enables engineers to do, CAD plays a large role in the development of new products and technologies.
"You can capture 3-D geometry and 4-D animation and make changes to it much more easily than you could with a series of 2-D drawings," Minardi said, adding that CAD representations can be useful for "a wide range of applications."
Hassoun recently chaired the International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD), which highlighted advances in CAD tools for both traditional and futuristic technologies.
As Hassoun pointed out, the use of CAD in integrated circuits has existed for over three decades, though it is still being fine-tuned. "The task of placing millions of building blocks - the transistors - and connecting them on a small area is daunting," she said. "Ideally, a designer should specify the desired functionality and performance specification, and, presto, out comes a detailed integrated circuit design ready for manufacturing."
Hassoun added, however, that "that is not the case."
Instead, the typical design flow is more complex. First, engineers must specify a design using high-level language that can then be translated to a logical circuit that can process zeroes and ones. The logical circuit is then synthesized into transistors and wires.
Finally, a physical design phase places the transistors in the specified chip area and connects them. This last phase can require several iterations before the setup meets its design requirements, and then the design must be tested to ensure that the circuit is bug-free. CAD technology is used to facilitate this process.
As the physical size of current electronic equipment rapidly shrinks, the CAD technology used to design those devices must evolve along with that equipment. Currently, the basic units being used in circuits are stretched to the limits: As cell phones shrink nearly to the size of fun-size candy bars, a traditional transistor's dimensions cannot be scaled down any further.
This predicament spells dramatic change for future technological development: The International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors, an assessment given by a consortium of international semiconductor industry associations, has predicted that small modifications of traditional transistors will serve the world until 2015, after which new technologies or hybrid technologies will be necessary.
In view of this impending crossroads, the ICCAD conference highlighted several new technologies, aiming to inspire a new wave of CAD technologies and methodologies to serve designers in 2015.
The technologies trumpeted at the conference included the molecular single-electron transistor, which looks to shrink even further the size of electronic hardware. They also included DNA self-assembly, which would allow faster construction of the technology at lower cost, as well as other futuristic devices like biofluidic microchips, which include lab-on-a-chip mechanisms to allow for on-the-spot biochemical analyses.
In the end, many of the new CAD technologies will be working to design equipment that could fit onto a human thumbnail. According to Hassoun, the impact may be larger than one can fathom.
"We underestimated the impact of computers in our lives 30 years ago," she said. "And we may be underestimating the effects of the new technology fueled by CAD in 10 years."
Part two of this series - which focuses on Tufts' own CAD lab and the students who use it - will appear in tomorrow's Daily.
Patrice Taddonio contributed to this article.
