Dassault Systèmes, the 3DEXPERIENCE company, is a leading global provider of PLM/CAD/CAM/CAE solutions with revenues exceeding three billion Euros and over 250,000 customers in all industries in more than 140 countries.
LEDAS Ltd. and Dassault Systèmes (DS) signed in 1999 a long-term cooperation agreement, under which we provided R&D (research and development) services to DS and integrated some of its own technologies and know-how into the following CATIA V5 and V6 products:
Technology projects developed by LEDAS for DS include a geometric constraint solver, a collision detection and resolution engine, a polygonal mesh optimizer, and a non-linear solver.
The overall volume of these contracts exceeded 100 person-years. The development work gave the LEDAS team a unique experience that enabled us to improve our competence in areas such as technology development and project management.
Bricsys is a global provider of DWG engineering design software brought to market under the BricsCAD brand. For the last two decades, the company focused on building cost-effective, mission-critical CAD tools. In 2018, Bricsys became a part of the global technology giant Hexagon AB.
In 2010-2011, in the framework of a large contract, LEDAS implemented for Bricsys a module which enabled direct modeling in BricsCAD. Shortly after that, Bricsys agreed to acquire the IP (intellectual property) rights of our products and technologies, including the LGS 2D/3D solution.
To efficiently manage and develop the acquired IP, Bricsys signed a services agreement with LEDAS to establish a wholly owned subsidiary, Bricsys Technologies Russia, and then opened a new office near our headquarters in Novosibirsk, Russia.
One of the more recent projects LEDAS completed for Bricsys was the implementation of a 3D compare function in BricsCAD based on know-how that we developed with LGC (see LEDAS Geometry Comparison).
The primary contemporary CAD challenge is how to deal with history-free geometry imported from other CAD systems, because the lack of history tree makes it impossible to change the geometry through parametric features. Variational Direct Modeling (VDM) is a technology invented by LEDAS that allows modification of the geometry by retaining the design intent and constraints. VDM was integrated into a number of CAD systems, such as BricsCAD, KOMPAS-3D, Rhinoceros-3D, and Trimble SketchUp (formerly Google SketchUp). The user base of software using VDM is several tens of thousands of users.
C3D Labs is a provider of one of the leading commercial kernels on the global market competing with Parasolid (Siemens PLM Software) and ACIS (Dassault Systemes Spatial Corp). The beginning of the development of the C3D kernel is dated back to 1995, and it is used by many CAD/CAM companies worldwide: Altium, Nanosoft, Cype, Renga, and many others. The C3D toolkit combines a full-function geometric kernel, 2D/3D constraint solver, CAD format converter, and a visualizer.
The LEDAS team was involved in several projects with C3D Labs, beginning with implementing our Variational Direct Modeling (VDM) technology based on C3D toolkit for one of the regional CAD market leaders. Our software engineers then wrote innovative functions in the C3D kernel, such as converting triangulated models to B-reps (boundary representation) form, and an R&D project in geometric search for the AEC industry.