SolidWorks Premium

Mechanical CAD Capabilities

SWIFT (SolidWorks Intelligent Feature)

SWIFT let you spend time creating products that work well, instead of trying to make your software work for you. It automates time-consuming detail work and techniques, diagnosing and resolving problems related to feature order, mates, sketch relationships, and the application of dimensions.

User Interface

With the heads-up user interface, you get a complete, customizable set of visual display and mouse-driven control capabilities. This reduces design steps, minimizes dialog boxes, and decreases visual clutter.

Working with DWG

SolidWorks includes data translation tools for AutoCAD® users, along with help documentation, so you can smoothly convert DWG files into 3D models. Alternatively, you can use DWGeditor®–included with SolidWorks software–to edit, manipulate, and maintain existing AutoCAD DWG files in their native format.

Part Modeling

With Instant3D, you have the fastest, easiest way to create and modify 3D part geometry. By simply clicking and dragging, you can precisely create and resize features–even section entities. As you ready your design for production, use DimXpert to create accurate 2D drawings (or “drawing-less” data) to ensure your parts will fit when manufactured.

RealView Graphics

Visualize and communicate your designs more clearly than ever. You can quickly create nearly lifelike, fully dynamic representations of your parts, assemblies, and completed products–without rendering.

Advanced Surfacing and Complex Shapes

Improve the aesthetics, ergonomics, and usability of your product designs. Using the Freeform feature, creating new geometry, or importing and manipulating new surfaces, is easy and intuitive.

Sheet Metal Design

Create sheet metal parts from scratch using folds, bends, flanges, rips, tabs, and mitres, as well as lofted bends, sketched bends, hems, and more. Alternatively, you can create a solid shape as a starting point. Advanced capabilities, such as the “convert solid to sheet metal” functionality, let you develop a manufacturable sheet metal part.

Weldment Design

Sketch a layout for your frame and select a weldment profile. SolidWorks will automatically generate a weldment design in 3D. Modify, validate, and reinforce your design, and then enhance it with standard parts that you can drag and drop from the Design Library or 3D ContentCentral®. Then, generate precise manufacturing drawings with cut lengths for all segments.

Mold Design Tools

With SolidWorks, you can import part geometry in IGES, STEP, Parasolid®, ACIS®, and other formats to begin your mold designs. Create, validate, and execute your mold designs–and reduce manufacturing errors–with a complete range of tools and checks, speeding the design of cores and cavities, assembly features, and lip and groove features.

Assembly Modeling

SolidWorks gives you the tools to get it right on-screen when you create assemblies, saving you the time and cost of physical prototyping and remanufacturing. You can mate components by picking individual surfaces, edges, curves, and vertices; create mechanical relationships between components; conduct interference, collision, and hole alignment checks; and link the motion of pulleys and sprockets. You can also automatically assemble fasteners and accompanying hardware; automate the assembly of commonly used components, appropriate hardware, and required features; and use MateXpert to fix conflicts such as over-constraining a component.

Simulate Assembly Motion

Simply by clicking and dragging components, you can check an assembly for proper motion and collisions. In addition, you can simulate physical motion involving assembly mates, contact, springs, and gravity. SolidWorks Motion also provides accurate measurements of velocity, accelerations, and forces on components due to motion – so you have a realistic understanding of design decisions before producing the prototype product.

Large Assembly Management

Use “Lightweight” mode to reduce the time spent opening and working on large assemblies. SpeedPak technology enables you to create simplified versions of assemblies that speed assembly operations and drawing creation. Use Quick View to select and open just the component you need to work on, and use the Assembly Xpert to analyze and improve your assembly’s performance.

2D Drawing Creation

Use the familiar interface of DWGeditor to draw in 2D, as well as edit and maintain your existing DWG data files.

Data Translation

Easily import and use existing data, as well as data from external sources. SolidWorks includes translators that support DWG, DXF™, Pro/ENGINEER®, IPT (Autodesk Inventor®), Mechanical Desktop®, Unigraphics®, PAR (Solid Edge®), CADKEY®, IGES, STEP, Parasolid, SAT (ACIS), VDA-FS, VRML, STL, TIFF, JPG, Adobe® Illustrator®, Rhinocerous®, IDF, and HSF (Hoops) formats.

Design Reuse

Leverage your successful designs to create compelling proposals for new ones. Quickly search for already-created components in SolidWorks Toolbox, 3D ContentCentral, and your own custom Design Library. Then, simply drag and drop those parts into your new designs.

Bill of Materials

Save significant time when you use SolidWorks to automatically generate a complete bill of materials (BOM) from your design. Your BOM is associative: When you change your design, the BOM updates automatically, and vice versa. Plus, you can export the BOM data to Excel, Intuitive ERP®, and other applications.

Part Validation

SolidWorks Simulation tools help both new users and experts ensure their designs are durable, safe, and manufacturable. In addition, you can use SolidWorks FloXpress™ to optimize your designs for water- and air-flow effects.

Design Automation

Save time with SolidWorks Smart Component technology to automate the selection and insertion of standard components. Use DriveWorksXpress to automate repetitive design tasks that can be used in product/sales configurators.

Design Communication

With SolidWorks, you have numerous capabilities for accurately communicating design ideas and data to collaborators, upstream and downstream partners, and customers:

  • eDrawings® Files. Provide accurate – even animated – 2D and 3D models that anyone can understand.
  • PDF Files. Generate 2D or 3D PDF files directly from your SolidWorks designs.
  • 3D Instant Website. Create and publish live web pages to communicate visual information with customers or staff, and then receive immediate feedback.

Feature Recognition

When collaborators or partners use other CAD systems, FeatureWorks® helps you share and use 2D and 3D models more productively.

Standard Hardware Libraries

With SolidWorks Toolbox, SolidWorks Design ClipArt, and 3D ContentCentral, you have instant access to virtual encyclopedias comprising thousands of standard components.

Photorealistic Rendering

Use PhotoWorks™ and PhotoView 360 to leverage your SolidWorks 3D models for presentations, proposals, or virtual and material studies –before creating any parts. You’ll save time, while eliminating the high costs of prototyping and photography.

Design Standards Checking

Raise your quality level with SolidWorks Design Checker. With thorough, automated checks and autocorrect capability, you can ensure full compliance with your company standards – before you release your designs for manufacture.

Productivity Tools

SolidWorks Utilities enables designers to compare parts or drawings to find the differences between two similar designs or similar drawings. FeatureWorks streamlines the use of data from different CAD systems to work together.

Simplify Parts and Assemblies

Copy the visual properties of a selected annotation to another annotation. In addition to checking spelling, you can schedule a range of project-related tasks.

Leverage Scanned Data

Import digital scans of handcrafted models into SolidWorks using ScanTo3D. You can also import design concepts created in Rhinocerous software or sketches developed in Adobe Illustrator.

Routed Systems

Automate and accelerate the process of routing tubes, pipes, electrical cables, cable harnesses, and electrical conduits with SolidWorks Routing.

ECAD to MCAD Translation

CircuitWorks is designed to bridge the gap between SolidWorks and Electrical Computer-Aided Design (ECAD) systems by providing an intuitive tool that allows users to import and export Printed Circuit Board (PCB) designs between SolidWorks and ECAD systems.

Design Validation Capabilities

 

With the powerful design validation tools in SolidWorks® software, you can easily subject your designs to the same conditions that they’ll experience in the real world.


Tolerance Stack-up Validation.

TolAnalyst analyzes a design based on the order and manner in which parts are assembled, as well as DimXpert-applied dimensions and tolerances.

Assembly Simulation.

Study the interactions of assembly components on-screen, before incurring the costs of physical prototypes. Simulate static or dynamic loads to evaluate your design’s performance under stress, strain, and displacement.

Mechanism Simulation.

Apply a wide variety of physics-based models to simulate real-world operating conditions for your design. Check for colliding parts. Output numerical and graphic data of the results, as well as animations of your tests.

Simulate Welded Structures.

Ensure your welded structures perform at peak operating conditions. Apply pressure, forces, and bearing loads. Then use visualization tools like section plots, ISO clipping, and animation to review the response.

PDM Capabilities


Secure access.

Protect your product design data with secure managed access to authorized individuals, over a network or via the web. In addition to internal users, you also can permit access to partners, customers, and your supply chain.

Revision control.

Help your design team avoid overwriting files, and assist purchasing and manufacturing in ordering and producing the correct parts, every time.

Find files.

Quickly and easily find SolidWorks files by searching on metadata (Custom Properties).

View the SolidWorks Product Matrix