Estimated reading time: 1 minute

Happy's Essential Skills: Understanding Predictive Engineering

New product realization and design for manufacturing and assembly (DFM/A) have now started to become more visible as programs that can improve a company’s time-to-market and lower product costs. Many programs are underway by many companies and what is now needed is a framework to coordinate the application of these programs. This column will cover the interactions of DFM/A and the need for development of a new framework to coordinate the trade-offs. These trade-offs cover six key design topics:

• Optimization of PCB design grids and layout
• Minimization of assembly costs
• Analysis of test coverage
• Minimization of PCB substrate costs
• Use of preferred parts
• Partitioning of ASIC pinouts

Concurrent engineering has been the basis for electronics design. Its one-way interactions with manufacturing constitute the old way of thinking. This column will propose a new framework, predictive engineering, patterned after the manufacturing software framework of concurrent manufacturing. This framework will provide the inner-operability for manufacturing capabilities and characteristics to be planned into electronic assemblies before the traditional CAE/CAD processes. As part of this framework, the basis for trade-offs will be the basic DFM/A metrics that have been developed by different companies. Predictive engineering is complementary to the growing application of computer integrated manufacturing (CIM) software and product data management (PDM) software used in electronics manufacturing.

Editor's Note: To read this entire article, which appeared in the December 2016 issue of The PCB Magazine, click here.