Martin Keenan, Director of Application Strategy at RS Components, discusses a new alternative and flexible viewpoint for electronics design. A change in design approach brings together many of the challenges facing engineers today, enabling greater collaboration and significantly speeding up the prototyping process and the development of new product concepts.
engineering challenges
Engineers want to innovate and develop new ways of doing things, but more often than not they run up against formidable barriers. The challenges in the engineering world are manifold and growing in today's product development environment. One of the main problems is keeping fully up to date with the latest technological developments. This case is especially representative of engineers, who are expected to have a wide field of knowledge due to the industry's search for reduced design teams with a decreasing number of engineering specialists with experience in energy or analog design, for example. .
Another stumbling block is the increasing volume of projects that design teams are taking on. Even though it is debatable, if design is under pressure today it is high competitiveness, time-to-market, or in other words, the speed at which the designed product is on the market. Design teams are facing increasing pressure to bring to market products that offer better performance with ever greater functionality, as well as differentiation (which often means greater complexity), and in ever shorter time frames. The cost of the project must also be taken into account. While material costs are always important, the BOM (Bill of Materials) component fades in importance compared to the overall cost of hardware and software development over the design cycle.
However, to meet those objectives, a change in the traditional design strategy of many of today's companies is seen. This change consists of a move toward open resources, new design tools and resources, and rapid hardware prototyping.
Traditional Layout Flow
In the traditional design flow, before design work can begin, product specifications need to be collected from multiple sources, including internal departments like sales or marketing, as well as key customers. In addition to the investigation of the technologies necessary to meet the specifications, it is necessary to carry out a study to verify the viability of a product in the face of market demands, and also, to know what it will take to ensure success in a highly competitive market. . Documentation is a key element: product functionality must be detailed along with minimum acceptance specifications, as well as gathering data on market potential, target customers, and expected return on investment. Once the design work really begins, documentation is key to ensuring that the design process continues to a very specific end point.
But there are many pitfalls in this strategy: requirements gathering can be a lengthy process, and opportunities for engineers to innovate outside of them can be severely limited. In addition, there is typically only a subgroup of the engineering team involved in the requirements gathering process, which means an underuse of the team's collective expertise. Time constraints in the development cycle often lead to a heavy reliance on previous product designs, as the market need may have varied or been met by the competition by the time the product is available.
Flexibility of the strategy
Progressively, the industry is undergoing a transformation in its way of approaching product design. The “rapid concept and prototyping” approach significantly enables front-line requirements: the end goal is much more relaxed with “must-have” functionality identified at a higher level, allowing entire engineering departments to be involved in the brainstorming. Multiple concepts can be digitally recreated and developed in parallel, keeping strong points and quickly discarding weak ones, making the process evolutionary and iterative. Production of physical prototypes is possible, followed by immediate customer and market testing, selecting a small number of prototypes for the full design process. Some of the advantages included in this approach are: the ability to react quickly to market demands; the encouragement of innovation, inherent to the process; time-to-market reduction; the training of engineers in all departments of the process and the construction of an experiential base, whether a concept is carried out or not.
Technologies for advancement
However, this new approach to product development is only beneficial if it encourages engineers to be part of the concept process, something difficult to implement in the past. However, there are three key strategies to move this approach from being a possibility to becoming a real alternative.
The first item is the open source material. The increasing availability of open source hardware and software, including proven hardware reference designs and scores of software protocols from semiconductor vendors and other manufacturers, gives engineers a valuable start, allowing them to quickly prove concepts without the need for start from scratch. Additionally, platforms like the Arduino and Raspberry Pi also allow smaller companies to create products and systems based on these modular building blocks.
The second element is the increasing availability of free design software, led by the release of DesignSpark PCB: powerful, easy to use, unrestricted, and with no annual license fee. This tool has eliminated the need for specialist PCB engineers (usually using premium PCB software such as OrCAD, PADs or Altium). The availability of free PCB design software allows engineers to rapidly design new concepts. In fact, many manufacturers choose to use DesignSpark PCB software to promote their reference designs to the mainstream audience.
An additional component is the creation of mechanical designs and concepts. Rapid creation of mechanical concepts has always been an obstacle to flexible design, as 3D CAD tools have always been the domain of trained CAD specialists and cost many thousands of dollars/euros with annual subscriptions. Therefore, the general engineering community could not establish relationships with 3D design. However, in September 2013, DesignSpark Mechanical was released. Free and based on direct modeling techniques that allow non-CAD specialists to conceptualize 3D products. Now, more than 100.000 engineers around the world have already included DesignSpark Mechanical in their design processes.
The final element is much faster prototyping. One valuable resource is the availability of PCB manufacturers, who can ship prototype boards in just a few days at relatively low cost. Another resource is the increasing access to 3D printers, which are gaining ground significantly, as well as having a tremendous impact on the ability to rapidly produce prototypes and carry out mechanical design concepts.
Democratize the concept to the creation
In summary, an increase in design resources from vendors, open source platforms and materials, the availability of free PCB-design and 3D design tools, and rapid prototyping capabilities such as the use of 3D printers, have combined to enable an agile approach that democratizes the design process, opens up significant opportunity for further innovation, and allows engineers to get to concept design in a substantially shorter amount of time.
