Bridging the chasm between design and manufacturing

In recent times, the big story in the electronics field has been India’s strong emergence as a source of electronic designs that are now finding their way into the most innovative electronic products. India is fast emerging as the new-age electronics design-driver for companies worldwide. What started as a limited design/verification activity focused on utilizing India’s vast talent-pool of engineers, has now grown into strategic R&D investments by these companies to tap the huge consumer-base in the country. Established players in almost all cutting-edge technology domains such as wireless, aerospace, and high-speed designs, are increasing their design related activities in India. The missing-gap on the application/market-knowledge is now being bridged by the emergence of new companies which are devoted to developing IP(Intellectual Property) that will be licensed for use in products/applications that might soon become a part of our everyday life.

The market is dynamic. The consumer is demanding and constantly seeking products that have newer features and that work on newer technologies. The success of Indian design houses would depend on how agile and successful they are in addressing these challenges. In the wireless industry for example, companies have to constantly keep churning out products that conform to emerging standards. The standards and the technology behind them have short shelf lives, and this increases the time-to-market pressure on product companies.

To address the time-to-market concern, an attempt has been made to improve the efficiency of the product development life cycle. The product development cycle consists broadly of the following steps:

· Design of the product/ architecture/ platform
· Validation of the design
· Manufacturing of products

A product goes through each of these steps a multiple number of times during its development cycle, and a key to reducing whole product development time is to reduce iterations between these stages.

A means of achieving this would be to ensure that design engineers have access to real-world data in the initial stage itself. This would help them to characterize and model components more accurately. This would reduce iterations between the design and the design validation stage. There are two approaches to enable designers to have access to real-world data.

Firstly, designers will need to work with instruments that can allow them to make complex and very-specific measurements. These instruments should also be easy to use and operable with minimum effort. This will ensure that designers spend a majority of their time on optimizing their designs and not spend too much time in trying to configure the instruments. There should also be a provision for easy access to captured data via industry standard interfaces like LAN, USB etc. The requirements for an instrumentation system can be summarized as:

· Have built in configurations for prevailing standards in the industry
· Provide easy one-button access for complex measurements
· Easy to use and intuitive interfaces with minimal reconfiguration
· Allow accessibility via LAN, USB for remote operation and data transfer


Secondly, designers work with EDA tools, which allow abstraction of the lower layers of circuit design. The efficiency of these can be greatly improved if these tools can be connected to the instruments used to make real-world signal measurements. Standardization of instrument connectivity interfaces allows for easy access to instruments. As a result of this a design engineer can use a captured wireless signal for analysis or alternatively generate a signal which has been designed and check for the quality of modulation, immunity to noise, etc. He could do this while using a commonly available LAN cable to connect to the instrument.

Making real-world data available to a designer reduces the product development time. This would lead to a faster time-to-market cycle and enable companies to take complete advantage of a technology shift.



You cn reach Santosh Reddy at santosh_reddy@agilent.com


Click here for Illustrations:
Figure 1