Happy’s Essential Skills: Design for Manufacturing and Assembly, Part 1

Estimated reading time: 9 minutes

The planning process central focus will be the tradeoffs between the loss and gain in performance for layout, fabrication, assembly and test versus the costs in these domains. Therefore, some major considerations will be the following sections:

1. New product design process      
2. The role of metrics                               
3. Layout tradeoff planning                             

Planning Concepts

Planning for design, fabrication and assembly (PDFA) is a methodology that addresses all those factors that can impact production and customer satisfaction. Early in the design process, the central idea of  PDFA is to make design decisions to optimize particular domains, such as “producibility,” “assemble-ability,” “testability,” as well as fit to a product families, etc. in manufacturing. Planning takes place continuously in the electronic design environment (Figure 4). The data and specifications flow in one direction, from product concept to manufacturing. During the design  process, 60%of the manufacturing costs are determined in the first stages of design when only 35% of the design engineering costs have been expended. The typical response is shown in Figure 5^[2].

Figure 4: The electronics design environment.

Producibility

Producibility is now regarded as an intrinsic characteristic of a modern design. Like the concept of quality in manufacturing, it must be built in, not inspected in. Producibility must be designed in; it cannot be a "checkpoint" in the design process or inspected in by tooling.

NEW PRODUCT  DESIGN 

The keys to superior producibility in new product design can be found in the expanded design process. One of those key items is the role of metrics or data-based analysis of planning tradeoffs.

Figure 5: Design costs accumulate early in the Life Cycle compared to intrinsic manufacturing costs.

Expanded Design Process

The new expanded design process that incorporates planning, tradeoffs and manufacturing audits is shown in Figure 6 and Table 2. The process is made up of 12 separate functions that incorporate the planning and tradeoffs sections in this book.

Figure 6: Specifications determine product partitioning and producibility.

Table 2: The expanded electronics design process and its stages.

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