Computer-aided designs, such as this model of a fingertip-sized heart pump, can reduce the number of physical prototypes that must be made. Computer-aided design (CAD) is a tool intended to facilitate ...

Phil Goldstein is a former web editor of the CDW family of tech magazines and a veteran technology journalist. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife and their animals: a dog named Brenna, and ...

In the early days of the semiconductor industry, integrated circuits were designed by one or two engineers with slide-rules, hand-drawn on paper, and then given to a lithographer to print onto silicon ...

For decades, computer-aided design (CAD) has been the cornerstone of modern engineering. Yet much of the workflow still relies on manual repetition, rigid processes and human interpretation. Engineers ...

This article was taken from the November 2012 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands ...