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From the Editor: The Human BOM
December 31, 1969 |Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
I took some time this past weekend reading the family history my grandmother had prepared for the Sanford/Somers line. I've often been impressed by people who can recount family history for generations. My paternal grandparents passed away very young, leaving little family history information, and I had not known much about the maternal Sanford/Somers line. A family history can help you discover that you're one whole a person composed of many pieces. In the electronics industry, we have a pretty good understanding of this concept. Every electronic assembly designed is a composition of multitudinous bits and pieces, which can combine, in ideal circumstances, to be a productive, long-lasting, reliable, exciting electronic device. Rearrange these bits and pieces, and you can end up with disaster. In electronics, design determines a great deal of an assembly's success, hand-in-hand with production.
It seems you might be able to have a nature/nurture debate with electronics, comparing the role of design with that of production processes, but that's a whole other barrel of monkeys. It's obvious that your design had better be good, as it is Step 1 for a robust product. Not only should the design meet size, power, functionality, and other system requirements, it also should be accomplished as quickly as possible to ensure a relevant product, and should optimize costs to ensure a profitable product. This summer, Altium is releasing the latest version of its Altium Designer toolset to help bring design teams more in-synch, from electrical to mechanical specialists, and to help improve board layout and possibilities. Altium is calling the concept "unified design," meaning that the rigid interactions of materials, layout, mechanics, etc. are pushed together into a more interactive environment. Here, space considerations can be weighed against power needs and BOM/layout decisions can be tested out early in the process. Many electronics design tools are taking this collaborative direction as more price and time pressures come down on the shoulders of prototypers, developers, and design teams. To discover the benefits of Altium's upgrades, I spoke with Rob Irwin, product marketing manager at the company.
Altium Designer brings together hardware, software, and programmable hardware development into a unified environment. This helps designers exploit large-scale programmable devices as system development and deployment platforms, according to Irwin. A given set of programmed device intelligence can be deployed across multiple hardware domains. Other elements of the design environment include 3D visualization of the board during design, introduced a few versions ago; dynamic linking of ECAD to MCAD files, an important new aspect; single data model between schematic, board, FPGA, and embedded design; and overarching project/data collaboration and interactive management. "Altium Designer brings together a broad mix of design elements into a unified solution, including physical hardware, programmable devices, and other elements," Irwin noted. "You can't fully exploit the potential of these things with a silo-ed design mentality."
The Summer 2008 release of Altium Designer includes a new file importer that allows Allegro files to be brought into the environment easily. It also has a new interactive routing engine, allowing designers to create routing patterns more intuitively. The most exciting element of this release is the linking between electrical and mechanical design (ECAD to MCAD). This was based in the 3D interactive rendered model of PCBs that Altium introduced with the 3D visualization update. Designers could examine structures, overlays, internal wiring, etc. "It was interesting having that 3D ability by itself, but it really was a great foundation to build other technologies off of, including this MCAD-to-ECAD linking with STEP models," Irwin explained. You now can examine case design along with PCB design and component layout, for example. Designers can make intelligent choices based on the final product and functionality/design goals, established tolerances, etc. This reduces versioning of prototype products, excessive tolerances based on guess work, and mechanical/electrical disconnects. Mechanical designers have actually made cardboard cutouts of PCBs to base their mechanical layout on. This is not a reliable interface from the electronic to mechanical worlds, Irwin pointed out.
Engineers are going to be working across multiple disciplines in this industry; it's a fairly concrete trend. "A few years ago, we stood back and looked at where design was heading the emerging trends in design and the industry, primarily looking at embedded technology, FPGAs, and related areas. We saw the convergence of a lot of technologies, and the broadening out of board design from physical board to the entire design process," Irwin explained, adding that Altium came from a traditional board design heritage. With the Summer 2008 release of Altium Designer, board designers have a better understanding of how the board is going to fit with the final product, he stressed. Heat tolerances, height clearances, component spacing, and other product-level considerations make a huge difference to board designers. This is a generally applicable design requirement. Designers are no longer designing square boards for square cases, not even in industrial assemblies. When you get into ruggedized military electronics, or boards with external connectors and keyboards, or consumer boards required to have aesthetic value to match their functional merits, it makes even more sense to involve the case and the board together, allowing a lot more freedom.
Many design software providers are increasingly recognizing the importance of bringing mechanical elements like a cell phone casing or external attachments into the BOM for an electronic assembly. SolidWorks is one that recognized the disconnect from the mechanical engineers' perspective, Irwin said, but this Altium release takes on the problem from the board designers' perspective.
In the future, there's going to be less reliance on a hardware-centric design environment, he added. Time spent on hardware problems will be considered a waste, because it doesn't differentiate your product. Altium puts a lot of intellectual property (IP) into their systems, to take care of unique interfaces, taking as much functionality out of hardwired chips and putting it into programmable devices. This builds up a system that designers can redeploy across multiple prototypes. They also have a lot of physical layout IP, another method to save designers time. When designers have more time, they can spend it on developing the technology that will differentiate their product when it hits the market.
Diversifying your design considerations makes the initial stages of product development somewhat more laborious, but a good integration tool should help all of the designers in the mix work together, and your production team will thank you for the extra effort. Hopefully your customer will too, as their product arrives in time, with quality manufacturing and a sound design behind it.
To be honest, I could give you a better account of my horse's lineage than my own. I had a vague notion that we were Scottish on my mother's side, which turned out to be true, but as I read through the genealogy lists, surnames like Kauhout, Sniffin, and Esposito conjured up a more heterogeneous pan-European-and-beyond mix. (A Sniffin google search brought up the 1880 New York Times headline "The Sniffin Family Troubles.") The family history was immensely interesting, with attention-grabbing lost details sprinkled in, such as "Walt, brother of Cephus, took off at age 30, never heard from again. Believed to be soldier of fortune," that made me want to learn more. Genetics are part of who we each are, and a family history can be considered the metaphorical bill of materials for offspring. In my mind, our "human BOMs" are simply retrospective tools that can add a new perspective or a new dimension to life. Irwin agreed that 3D visualization technology and mechanical integration offer designers a new perspective on the data they've already got. This new perspective can radically change a design, for the better, before it's too late. Irwin says that even experienced board designers can have "gotcha" moments where they pick up design errors in 3D that they had missed in traditional design environments. Consider the value for less-experienced designers, who represent a growing demographic. In electronics, where BOMs are hammered out as the crucial starting point for a functional, profitable, on-time product getting to market, we need design software that can adapt to changing industry and remove trial-and-error wastes that cripple product development.
Meredith Courtemanche, managing editor
Be sure to join the American Competitiveness Institute (ACI) for a free workshop presented by ACI, Indium Corp., and SMT, June 25 in Philadelphia. ACI Hosts Lead-free Workshop.