A typical contemporary computerized product develop me nt workflow is outlined in Fig.1. Product geometry information is first prep ared with computer-aided design (CAD) software. The CAD format can then be com municated to other downstream-computerized applications like, computer-aided e ngineering analysis (CAE), computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) and/or rapid prot otyping. Since design may need to be modified to incorporate new requirements, a loop back path is also depicted in Fig.1. The design e...