Review of CAD/CAM solutions for numerical control part programming

An analysis of the principles and features of CAD/CAM solutions for the automatic generation of Numerical Control (NC) code is presented. A comparison of two commercial packages, NCPOLARIS (PC based), and UNIGRAPHICS II (workstation based), is made. The latter is clearly superior in processing speed but substantially more expensive. The former should not be excluded however as it compares favourably in other features such as Customisation and tool management; features that are often more important than speed.