INITIAL GRAPHICS EXCHANGE SPECIFICATION (IGES)

The IGES project was started in 1979 by a group of CAD users and vendors, including Boeing, General Electric, Xerox, Computervision and Applicon, with the support of the National Bureau of Standards (now known as NIST) and the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). The name was carefully chosen to avoid any suggestion of a database standard that would compete with the proprietary databases then used by the different CAD vendors. An ANSI standard since 1980, IGES has been used in the automotive, aerospace, and shipbuilding industries. It has been used for weapons systems from Trident missile guidance systems to entire aircraft carriers. These part models may have to be used years after the vendor of the original design system has gone out of business. IGES files provide a way to access these data decades from now. Today, plug-in viewers for Web browsers allow IGES files created 20 years ago to be viewed from anywhere in the world. IGES was the first standard exchange format developed to address the need to communicate product definition data between different CAD/CAM systems. The early version of IGES were implicitly aimed at the CAD/CAM systems of the 1970s and early 1980s; that is, they mainly addressed the exchange of drawings. Recent versions have extended the types of data to be exchanged. For example, version2.0 supports the exchange of finite-element data and printed circuit-board data, version 3.0 enhances the capabilities of user defined Macros that are essential to exchange the standard part libraries, version 4.0 supports the CSG tree of a solid, and version 5.0 handles the B-rep data of solids. The basic organization of an IGES file is as follows: Flag section (optional)- This section is used only with the compressed ASCII and binary formats. Start section -This provides a human readable description of the file, such as the sending system that generated the original data, the pre-processor, and the product being described. Global section-This includes information describing the pre-processor and information needed by the post-processor to interpret the file. Directory entry section- This is a list of all the entities together with certain of their attributes. In an IGES file, all product definition data are expressed

as a list of predefined entities-the geometric entities such as lines, curves, planes and annotation entities such as notes and dimension values. Parameter data section- This contains the actual data defining each entity listed in the data entry section. Terminate section- This contains a single record that specifies the number of records in each of the four preceding sections for checking purpose.