Engineering workstations: A field report: Interviews with engineers having access to CAE workstations yield mixed responses; amidst the praise are complaints of insufficient power and excess complexity

Engineers who use computer-aided engineering workstations for electronic design say the equipment significantly increases their productivity and enables them to handle more complex jobs on tighter schedules than is possible with manual methods. On the other hand, the same engineers complain that workstations are slow to execute commands, sometimes cumbersome to use, and generally difficult to integrate into the overall production cycle. Interviews with engineers at five companies using CAE workstations revealed that although some perceptions of workstation capabilities are common to almost all installations, opinions about their overall usefulness vary depending on the kind of work the companies do, their particular engineering environments, and the ratio of engineers to workstations.