One of the more interesting automated design developments recently at the University of Dundee is in the field of advanced drugs, which for complex conditions and multiple targets, cause complex and difficult chemistries in need of optimisation. Dundee took the US baseball's Moneyball approach by using advanced statistical and data analysis techniques. Thanks to sensors, improved data capture and organised drug design databases, the developed algorithm has been able to learn from the human experience of drug design, mimicking it on a massive scale, and iterating it, to solve complex design problems. America's ITRS (international technology roadmap for semiconductors) estimates that the use of such simulation tools reduced chip development times and costs by about 40%. It has certainly been the golden mean for GSS (gold-standard simulations) software that in its latest research where the 3D simulator ran simulations on random dopants, line edge roughness and metal gate granularity as main sources of statistical variability on an unprecedented statistical scale. It emerges with the news that "If you can develop a metal-gate-last 28 nm FD-SOI technology you will be able to achieve an astonishing SRAM supply voltage, in the range of 0.5 to 0.6 V," says expert Professor Asenov. Small wonder GSS is part the Fraunhofer Institute's SUPERTHEME project for circuit stability under process variability and electro-thermal-mechanical coupling. At the Fraunhofer Institute for Mechanics of Materials project manager Dr Dirk Helm and his scientists have use simulations to develop shape memory alloys, developing various objects, such as minuscule forceps for endoscopy, where its small dimensions and elasticity, can be thoroughly sterilized with no joints. Numerical simulation models allow researchers to calculate in advance the components, the strength and clamping force, and efficiently develop and manufacture the component. "By using simulations, we can avoid producing most of these prototypes," said Dr Helm. " This saves costs because the raw materials for the shape memory alloys are very expensive and are sometimes difficult to work with." In addition, the researchers can estimate how durable the materials are through the simulations. So smaller wonder, perhaps, that news from IT design-conscious Apple, is that it is to invest in WITNESS from Lanner—simulation software originally developed in the OR department of British Leyland Motors. The licence and maintenance agreements will put WITNESS at the heart of simulating and optimising business processes within Apple enable it to represent real world processes in a dynamic animated computer model and then experiment with alternative what-if? scenarios to optimise production across its business. Power Systems Design
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