10 May 2010
I make documents…
A friend of mine spends most of his working hours designing huge steel contraptions that mount on the back of equally huge earthmoving vehicles – things like multi-baffled tanks, earth scrapers, lifting jigs and so on. They're heavy duty, but nonetheless quite sophisticated designs, as it happens.
Like all design engineers, he uses his experience, engineering knowledge and CAD skills to take on the complex process of creating the accurate, detailed engineering description of what needs to be manufactured. A man of few words, he's given up trying to explain exactly what he does to non-engineering types that ask.
He now simply responds with "I make documents". Not one to cause confusion, he usually follows up with a qualifying statement in the same laconic vein; "The documents are instructions for building big machines." It's a terse summary, but it's also correct.
For all the effort and skill involved in the process of designing those huge contraptions, he knows that the end result is a set of design data documents that are passed on to the broader organisation. Or more specifically, the appropriate subsets of output documents are sent to senior management, company records, procurement, manufacturing, testing and so on. He also knows that both his reputation as a design engineer and the success of the manufactured design are dependent on the quality and integrity of those output documents.
Not taking anything away from mechanical design engineering, my friend's view perhaps carries even more gravity in the electronics design world, where complexity kicks in at a higher level. The myriad of processes and design domains involved, the huge number of individual parts and assemblies used, and the interrelationship between all those factors means there's so much more that can go wrong. Or to put it more positively, there's so much more that needs to be correct before production output documents are generated.
Like my friend, that's what we actually do as electronic engineers. Ultimately, we make documents. They are documents that can potentially make or break a company, or even change the world, and they have to be reliable, accurate and accountable.
Invariably, organisations have some kind of system in place to help maintain the integrity of the design data used to create those documents. The systems vary widely depending on company size and sophistication, but usually take a 'lockdown' approach of introducing restrictions on what can be used and changed in a design, and when that can happen. A design can't move from one stage to the next without a complex, often frustrating approval process, probably involving a string of signatures as the design is rubber stamped up through the management chain.
What an organisation considers a rigorous data management process may be doing little more than annoy design engineers or worse, severely restrict the opportunity to explore creative and innovative solutions to design problems. And to make things worse, the disruptive and complex manual processes are probably doing a pretty average job of verifying the integrity of the design data itself.
Is the design validated and correctly synchronized? Do the DRC and ERC reports apply to the latest design revision? Has the parts library changed? Is the fabricator getting the complete set of manufacturing data? The list goes on, and while manual processes are involved there's a large potential for error.
In the end it's all about getting those critical design output documents right. Currently, juggling the balance between applying design data integrity systems and maintaining a creatively productive design environment involves compromises at both levels. What we need is a rigorous but automated design verification and release system that's part of the design process itself, so we can get back to doing what designers do best – making documents that produce innovative and competitive electronic products.
To see what Altium has just developed in this area, take a look at the upcoming webinar series, 'Design Configuration and Release Process Management'.
Author
Rob Evans, technical editor, Altium
Supporting Information
Websites
http://www.altium.com
Companies
Altium Ltd
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