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Happy’s Tech Talk #48: Digital Twins—Integrating Design and Manufacturing

New product realization and design for manufacturing and assembly (DFM/A) are becoming increasingly visible as programs that can improve time-to-market and reduce product costs. These simulations of real-time manufacturing are now referred to as digital twins. While many companies are developing such programs, a unifying framework is needed to coordinate their application.

Concurrent engineering has been the basis for electronics design, but its one-way interactions with manufacturing constitute the old way of thinking. This column proposes a new framework based on digital twins, enabling manufacturing constraints to be incorporated earlier in the design process. 

The capabilities of electronic technologies are growing at an ever-increasing rate. Unfortunately, we have also seen a corresponding increase in the complexity of packaging. Modern EDA tools and concurrent engineering are primary drivers of this phenomenon. What we have not yet developed is an effective way to feed manufacturing experience and knowledge back into design. 

The Nature of the Problem
Experienced manufacturing personnel are becoming increasingly scarce, and developing that expertise takes years. In many cases, manufacturing is also geographically distant, making knowledge transfer even more difficult. As a result, input is often reduced to opinion rather than data, making it difficult to defend or apply consistently. 

While this might be a viable solution for small, vertically integrated companies with extensive manufacturing experience, printed circuit packaging has advanced significantly. Not only is surface mounting now very fine-pitch, but we have ball grid arrays, flip-chip, and chip-scale packages.

These challenges have led to widespread adoption of DFM/A approaches, but they remain fragmented. They focus on separate domains, ranging from minimization of assembly and substrate costs, optimization of printed circuit design and layout, and analysis of test coverage.

The Opportunity of Design for Manufacturing (DFM/A)
There are four compelling reasons why predictive engineering is essential to the design of electronic products:

1. Products have become increasingly complex. Not only must products meet higher customer expectations, but they must also be environmentally friendly, energy-efficient, and resource-conserving in ever-shrinking product lifecycles.
2. Minimizing cost is imperative. DFM/A has been shown in benchmarking and case studies to reduce assembly costs by 35%1, PWB costs by 25%,2 and 75% of a product's manufacturing cost is determined by its design drawings and specifications.
3. In the electronic product design process, 60% of the manufacturing cost is determined in the first stages of design when only 35% of the design cost has been expended. The product definition process includes specifications and partitioning. This is a technology tradeoff analysis (the balance of loss and gain in various domains’ performance vs. costs).
4. Manufacturing should be linked to design and R&D through a common language that defines producibility as an intrinsic characteristic of a design. It is not a manufacturing inspection milestone. Producibility scores provide a non-opinionated basis for a team approach that results in a quality, cost-competitive product.

What they all have in common is metrics. But the design community is suspicious when the entire system is not considered. They are afraid of sub-optimization, where the cost of a particular domain is lowered, but the total system cost goes up. The industry does not lack DFM/A tools or metrics; it lacks a way to integrate them across the full design and manufacturing process.

Digital Twins
Digital twins (DT) enable systematic trade-off analysis across multiple design and manufacturing domains. It brings together product definition, fabrication, and assembly considerations into a single trade-off environment.

A digital twin of the performance and costs (yields) based on predictive models and simulations can be coded to allow the designer to see the effects of various parameters on the PCB without ever actually building it. As shown in Figure 3, this allows the user to improve on any product development or product change process.

One key element that’s missing is the global assignment of custom ASIC pin locations. This would help to reduce PWB and assembly complexity and costs, while assuring better system performance and the best “time-to-profits.”

The DT framework (Figure 3) imports critical metrics and data from manufacturing through the PDM database.3

The DT software architecture of tradeoff models and supporting software provides the user with global information. As features are selected, they can be placed back in the PDM database. Selection of layout factors, sizes, and design rules can be used to create technology files that drive modern CAD programs.

Digital Twins’ IPC-2551
IPC-2551 is the digital twin standard for assembly automation that provides all DT developers with the information and guidance necessary to understand a full DT implementation. It also provides information and guidance on how manufacturers can benefit from digital twins, how to assess DT readiness levels, and how to prepare a factory of any size or production volume to implement a full DT approach to its factory and/or products.

The effect is that physical prototypes of any description can be avoided, including trial and error, resulting in vastly reduced lead-time, elimination of mistakes, and lower costs.

Conclusion
To reduce time-to-market and production costs, companies must integrate DFM/A into a cohesive product generation framework that includes DT predictions, concurrent manufacturing, and PDM systems. This integration is essential for developing competitive electronic products. Typical digital twin software development tools are available from companies such as ScaleOut software.4

The tools, software, and elements of such a vision are shown in Figure 4. The remaining challenge is integrating these capabilities into a unified software environment that fully supports digital twin implementation.

References

1. “Design Report Card: A Method for Measuring Design for Manufacturability,” by H. Hume, R. Komm, and T. Garrison, Surface Mount International Conference, September 1992.
2. “Microvia PCBs: The Next Generation of Substrates and Packages,” by H. Holden, Future Circuits, Issue 1, Vol. 1.
3. “PDM Caps the Enterprise Strategy,” by R. Davis, Manufacturing Systems, May 1994.
4. “Real-Time Digital Twins: A New Approach to Streaming Analytics,” by ScaleOut Software, 2021.

Happy Holden has worked in printed circuit technology since 1970 with Hewlett-Packard, NanYa Westwood, Merix, Foxconn, and Gentex. He is currently a contributing technical editor with I-Connect007, and the author of Automation and Advanced Procedures in PCB Fabrication, and 24 Essential Skills for Engineers. 

This column originally appeared in the May 2026 issue of I-Connect007 Magazine.