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AMI4900: Engineering Design

Unit 1: Commercial Overview

Section 1: Introduction to Commercial Overview

1.1 Introduction to Commercial Overview

The purpose of Engineering Design is the establishment of a new product or process to enhance the profitability of a company. This has to be considered against the background of the pressure that is involved with the process. The pressure comes from satisfying the competing demands of:

• The market place
• The design environment
• Company capabilities in design, manufacturing, distribution and sales
• Environmental standards both in the safe use of equipment (Health and Safety Legislation), the use of acceptable manufacturing processes and the management of the equipment through out its product life cycle
• The intent is that this should be achieved in such a way that engineering design satisfies the following points:
• Meet all the user requirements
• Meets environmental standards for production, use and disposal
• Be in the shortest possible time
• Have a cost basis that enables the company to meet its commercial objectives

The Pace of Change is becoming faster all the time and designers need to review this in the light of product performance and capabilities. Electronic engineering is becoming both simpler and more complex. The growth in semiconductor technology is well documented.

In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore saw the future. His prediction popularly known as Moore 's Law, states that the number of transistors on a chip doubles about every two years. This observation about silicon integration, made a reality by Intel, has fuelled the worldwide technology revolution.

Our world-leading silicon technologies have supported the development and worldwide adoption of our industry-standard architectures and platforms, making Intel the world's largest silicon supplier. The best is yet to come. Our R&D investment and silicon expertise support unique Intel breakthroughs that will enable us to drive Moore 's Law well into the future and deliver more exciting capabilities into our technologies.

Many are familiar with Intel's exponential increases in the number of transistors integrated into our processors and other leading platform ingredients. These increases, as the following graph illustrates, have steadily and reliably lead to more computing performance as measured in millions of instructions per second (MIPS).

Figure 1.1.1 Moore 's Law

But Moore 's Law also means decreasing costs. As silicon-based components and platform ingredients gain in performance, they become exponentially cheaper to produce, and therefore more plentiful, more powerful, and more seamlessly integrated into our daily lives. Today's microprocessors run everything from toys to traffic lights. A musical birthday card costing a few U.S. dollars today has more computing power than the fastest mainframes of a few decades ago.

See:

http://www.intel.com/technology/silicon/mooreslaw/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law

This increase in the effectiveness of silicon technology has demanded significant increases in the complexity of all technologies associated with the design and manufacture of electronic systems. For example printed circuit boards have become more complex for example:

• 2 layers to many layers
• Finer resolution in track sizes
• Greater need for thermal management to compensate for higher operating temperatures due to greater power dissipation of the devices
• Faster operating speeds due to reduced silicon component geometries leading to the need to design track lengths and structures to minimise interference and to maximise system performance
• New component sizes and assembly techniques to cater for the increased pin count on devices
• Higher density component pin counts to facilitate the efficient utilisation of the semiconductor capabilities

Microcontrollers have grown in their performance and reduced in physical size. New design architectures have been developed for them that simplify the way that the operating code can be designed and implemented. High level languages are now very common and are now the norm. Tools have been developed to facilitate the development and test of the software product both as simulators and in circuit testing. The intent of these developments is to shorten the development time whilst at the same improving the performance and integrity of the software.

Changes in technology also occur in other technologies such as FPGAs. They have grown from 25k gates to 10M gates in current use. It is expected that they will be 400 greater in less than 10 years.

Time-to-market is the prime factor that designers have to contend with. The delay of a product introduction can delay the change from expenditure to income generation, hence profitability for a company. This is a key issue that will be addressed in this module and the course.

Design time and control of the design process is a key factor in a successful development of new products. Significant research has been carried out into product development and guidance has been produced defining best practice to achieve better results. For example results from Standish Group research indicate the following.

"One third of projects overrun by at least 100% and many more overrun by 50%"

The Standish group: http://www.standishgroup.com/sample_research/index.php

A survey showing project resolution is shown below. In this it is clearly seen that only 28% of projects finish on time

Figure 1.1.2 Project Resolution

Successful: The project is completed on time and on budget, with all features and functions as originally specified.

Challenged: The project is completed and operational, but over-budget, over the time estimate and with fewer features and functions than initially specified.

Failed: The project is cancelled before completion.

The Standish Group list the following points from its 2001 report as an indication as the top ten points in achieving a successfully completed project.

The higher the score you can obtain from a project the higher will be the chance of success.

A simplified design flow is shown below defining the major stages in the design process. This is a waterfall approach to the design process. There is an indication of where in the process major documentation is completed.

Figure 1.1.3 A simplified design flow

Honesty has to put into this process right from its inception. The concept has to be clear and concise so that all participants in the design process can freely express their thoughts upon the viability of the project. It is important to consult not only with sales and marketing to establish the business case for the new product but all those that will be involved in the product life cycle. It is not a good idea for example to design in cheap components to lower the unit cost if it is not does not provide an effective field support option for subsequent failure of the component during it s normal operational life. It is important that this dialogue and communication takes place up and down the company structure.

If a clear concept and user requirement can be established in the early stages of the project then this is beneficial. Maintaining communications with all stake holders at this stage is vital to the establishment User Requirements Specification that is clear and understood both by the user and the developers. It is important that the system specification produced after the analysis truly reflects the concept contained within the User Specification. It is important to explore all possibilities in the design to ensure that the ideas being developed are coherent and correct. If errors or faults are found in the development strategy are highlighted they can be easily corrected. In the system below a figure of £25 is estimated to be the cost for the correction of this type of fault. As we go down the waterfall development cycle it will be seen that fewer faults are discovered but that the cost is increasing per fault. In this example it is seen that faults or errors occurring after the volume manufacturing stage have the highest cost. This is because the remedy for this fault is likely to involve a product recall. New software or hardware will have to be issued and the logistics involved become horrendous.

The moral here is then that considerable effort should be made in the early stages of the development project to ensure that all options are clearly thought through and well documented.

Figure1.1.4 A simplified design flow with cost indications for fault correction

Remember technology is constantly changing. Depending upon the predicted life cycle you will have to ensure that components have a viable life span. The premature removal of components from production could severely shorten the expected life cycle. The product would then have be reviewed and hard decisions taken on whether it should be removed from the market place or redesigned using newer components and systems.

Where possible try to reuse electronic designs or software systems as well as using standard packages to reduce development costs. Care should be taken to make sure that upward compatible systems are effective for future use. An example of this type of failure was the millennium problem associated with Personal Computers. When they were first designed nobody, assumed or dreamt, that the products using BIOS operating systems would still be use in 30 years time. Hence date time structures only used the last 2 digits to define the year of operation hence when the transfer between 1999 and 2000 took place there was a danger that systems would not be able to track time correctly. Significant effort was used to redesign or produce new designs to overcome this problem. In the event few faults cause problems because of the search for the possible errors plus the fact that technology changes had required new operating systems and hardware to be developed to operate significantly more powerful systems.

Current electronic designs have a high degree of flexibility due to the use of microcontrollers FPGAs and the construction of firmware and software. It is therefore theoretically possible to implement changes to the systems in a short period of time. However this process is fraught with problems. The changes you may make have to be extremely well thought through to fully understand all the ramifications of the proposed change. Careful change is therefore possible if prudent measures are taken.

It necessary to consider, consider, consider and consider again what is proposed before making any changes as unexpected system behaviour may result from quite innoxious changes. This uncontrolled change is the second largest cause of project failure.

To improve project performance it is necessary to be Managing Risk.

To achieve this 10 Golden Rules could be applied:

1. Create a spec
2. Get agreement on the spec
3. Set reasonable goals
4. Get agreement on the goals
5. Develop a detailed plan
6. Define meaningful milestones
7. Know and plan for the top 10 risks
8. Support your team
9. Encourage feedback
10. Do not punish the bearer of bad news

To manage this risk a range of product life management tools have been developed to assist develop viable products in the shortest possible time with minimal cost. The product is taken to market sooner and the time to profit is therefore also reduced.

This module on Engineering Design is intended to identify and explain the context of these tools so that designers and managers can access them. Other modules in this MSc also cover many these topics to a much greater depth.

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