Referring to CATIA's 'assemblies + parts' modeling method, CATIA-based BIM (Building Information Modeling) technology has been proposed for highway tunnel design in this paper. A tunnel BIM is created by CATIA, which is based on a real case in China, focusing on the following 3 aspects: (1) Creating tunnel bolts by UDF + Loop cyclic arrangement method; (2) Using Sketch Tracer module to create tunnel portal; (3) Parameter is used to create and call the Catalog database. Then, bolt collision inspection and U-shaped groove concrete statistics are conducted with the help of the tunnel BIM created. Finally, the finite element analysis of tunnel construction process is carried out through the CATIA-Midas interface. The results demonstrate that the CATIAbased BIM technology can well adapt to the characteristics of tunnel and have well potential applications in tunnel design.