The Pentagon recently added Flexible Manufacturing to its list of critical technologies, including CAD/CAM/CAE/CAPP, logic synthesis, device simulation, standard product data exchange, database technology and database integration, electronic data interchange, high-speed data transmission, and intelligent interfaces. {Military and Aerospace Electronics, 6/91.]

The National Research Council has published a report on "Mathematical Sciences, Technology, and Economic Competitiveness," $22.50, National Academy Press. (800) 624-6242. [Walter S. Wingo, Design News, 6/17.]

Sandia National Lab continues to have success in parallelizing its 20 most important supercomputer programs. William Camp, manager of the Mathematics and Computational Science Department, says that speedups are typically 10 to 100-fold over vector processing. [Design News, 6/17.]

Brad Rigdon, director of information systems and technology at McDonnell Douglas System Integration Co., heads a government/ industry task force to plan implementation of STEP, an inter- national digital format for product design information. Brad is also president of PDES, Inc., a consortium of 24 engineering firms working on product data exchange in the aerospace, automotive, construction, electronics, and shipbuilding industries. [Walter S. Wingo, Design News, 6/17.] (If you're into concurrent engineering and CIM support, you have to be a team player now. For more on concurrent engineering, see the 7/91 issue of IEEE Spectrum.)

Recent studies say that 20% of all electronic design costs and 37% of product development time are due to design errors. EDA frameworks and design-data management frameworks offer hope of reducing these costs and increasing productivity by 30%. Better-integrated designs may also result. The CAD Framework Initiative (CFI) is currently the best hope for an "open" framework that will permit any CAD tool to work with others in a heterogeneous hardware environment. No vendor currently offers a fully open framework, but DEC's UNIX-based PowerFrame environment is advertised as a good start. [Electronic Design, 6/13.]