Printed Circuit Design & Fab - July 2008 - (Page 20) SYSTEM dESiGn The CosT of AdvANCiNg TeChNologY New collaborative systems connect designers and extend their reach beyond the PCB to other disciplines, enhancing the product development cycle. by Henry Potts Dramatic changes have affected the electronics industry in the past few years and changes continue. Competition is steeper. Emerging countries once known for inexpensive manufacturing are now mainstream suppliers of high-end competitive products. Electronic companies once vertically organized from design through manufacturing now find themselves not only outsourcing manufacturing but also portions of their product design. PCB fabrication technologies are rapidly advancing. All of this puts companies on steep learning, technology adoption, and re-organization curves that require the use of more sophisticated and costly EDA design solutions. Such is the price of staying competitive. Regardless of the industry segment (telecom, consumer, automotive, industrial, and even military and aerospace), there are common business needs expressed by all electronics companies as they strive to survive. The first need is to meet ever decreasing time-to-market goals. Especially important in the consumer industry where product life cycles are measured in months, the company’s ability to hit a short market window and charge premium pricing for their new product makes the difference between profit and loss. Witness the iPhone, where just months after the first introduction, the price of a unit was reduced by hundreds of dollars and Apple’s inability to ramp production to full volume in the first months cost millions in profit. Even in the non-consumer automotive industries, time-to-market is becoming an important business requirement and driver. The second common need and driver in today’s competitive world is reduced development costs. Making designers more productive and adding efficiencies to the total product development process all affect the bottom line and enables companies to produce more profitable products with their limited resources. Removing wasted efforts and enabling designers to focus on the product — not how to use design tools — gives them more time to innovate, which leads to the third business need. That third need is to produce more competitive products (more functionality in smaller spaces at lower product cost). FiGurE 1. Spectrum analyzer board with mixed analog, digital, and rF circuitry. Courtesy of Agilent Technologies. 20 ! FiGurE 2. “Silos” in the standard product development process. JULY 2008 ! printEd circuit dESign & fAB
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