CATIA used for CAD

CATIA:
CATIA (Computer Aided Three dimensional Interactive Application) is a multi-platform CAD/CAM/CAE commercial software suite developed by French company Dassault Systemes and marketed world-wide by IBM. The software was originally intended for the development of Dassault's Mirage fighter jet, but became a runaway success and was subsequently adopted by numerous well known companies world-wide, such as Boeing and IBM. The software was also famously used by architect Frank Gehry in his building of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. CATIA is written in the C++ programming language. CATIA is the corner stone of the Dassault Systemes PLM software suite.
Features and capabilities:
Commonly referred to as a 3D Product Lifecycle Management software suite, CATIA supports multiple stages of product development (CAx). The stages range from conceptualization, through design (CAD) and manufacturing (CAM), until analysis (CAE).
CATIA provides an open development architecture through the use of interfaces, which can be used to customize or develop applications. The supporting application programming interfaces are as follows:
*The Fortran and C programming languages for version 4 (V4).
*The Visual Basic and C++ programming languages for version 5 (V5).
These APIs are referred to as CAA for V4 and CAA2 (or CAA V5) for V5. The CAA2 are component object model (COM) like interfaces. They provide integration for products developed on the CATIA suite of software.
Although later versions of CATIA V4 implemented NURBS, version 4 principally used piecewise polynomial surfaces. CATIA V4 uses a non-manifold solid engine.
Catia V5 features a parametric solid/surface-based package which uses NURBS as the core surface representation and has several workbenches that provide KBE support.
As of 2007, the latest release is V5 release 18 (V5R18).
One of the main reasons customers choose CATIA V5 is its ability to seamlessly interact and work in tandem with a host of other applications like Enovia, Smarteam, various CAE Analysis applications etc.
Supported operating systems and platforms:
CATIA V4 is supported for various flavours of Unix - IBM AIX, Hewlett Packard HP-UX, Silicon Graphics IRIX and Sun Microsystems Solaris.Catia V4 and its predecessor versions were also available for IBM MVS and VM/CMS mainframe platforms.
CATIA V5 is provided on Microsoft Windows and the above-mentioned Unixes.