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

Estimated reading time: 9 minutes

1. The formal Technology Tradeoff Analysis during Specifications
2. Detailed Tradeoff selection of features for layout, fabrication and assembly
3. Design Advice during component placement and routing
4. Manufacturing Audits to review the finished layout for producibility, time-to-market, and competitiveness

Product Definition

The initial new product design stage is specification and product definition. This key step takes ideas, user requirements, opportunities and technologies and formulates the executable specifications of a new product. During this operation, the ability to predict what will happen in manufacturing by technologists that may not have any manufacturing experience can affect both time-to-market and ultimate product costs. Figure 6 shows the technology tradeoff analysis that requires the balance of loss and gain in various domains performance versus costs. Size and partitioning for IC and ASIC must be balanced with overall packaging costs and the resultant electrical performance. All of these factors affect the manufacturing and product cost.

Another definition of this process could be called a "verified design"^[3]. A verified design is defined as one that was predicted from models or measures that have been correlated to past designs.

This is compared to the traditional approach which is a "non-verified design" or “trial-and-error.” This is diagrammed in Figure 7. The advantage of the "verified design" can be significant reduction in redesigns in order to achieve the original product objectives.

Figure 7: Design incorporating tradeoffs versus traditional design.

Editor’s Note: Part 2 of this article will be published tomorrow, June 30, 2016.

Update: Click here for the part 2 of the article.

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