The shipbuilding industry, especially the ship design, faces major opportunities and challenges with the promotion of digitalization. While the digital design improves the quality and efficiency of the ship design, there are still many difficulties in the ship design. The current urgent issues to be considered are to further optimize the design process, improve the efficiency, reduce the cost and achieve the autonomous control through digital technology. Innovative countermeasures are provided by analyzing the possible difficulties that may arise from the integration of the ship design and the digital technology. Furthermore, the current study introduces how the ship digital design platform achieves a breakthrough in general ship design through the unified object-oriented data management core and the time-period refresh mechanism. It explores a technical route of independent development characteristics for the research and development of ship digital design software with independent intellectual property rights.