When introducing disruptive tools, the difficulty of adoption is proportional to the cube of the number of organizational silos who need to agree.
Disruptive Tools Can Stall At Group Boundaries
Interesting web site demo at http://nextgenerationelectronicsdesign.com/ by the folks at Altium. It’s unlike any PCB demo I have ever seen and an interesting use of self-deprecating humor to talk about the challenges of linking FPGA, Board, and Mechanical design. Two time coded remarks
- at 2:25 “We did what any traditional EDA company would do, we denied and avoided the problem.”
- at 2:50 “After offering the same thing as everyone else for a while, we decided to grow some bollocks and actually solve this properly.”
- Followed by a sequence of 3D views of PCB design–not the traditional a birds eye view–that allow you to more easily judge height interaction issues.
Altium is an Australian company–you may know them as Protel–that does about US$50M in revenue. I caught this link on the Mentor communities site in the comments by “pcb_man” on a post by John Isaac “Collaboration Across the Product Development Process.”
This blurring of what were once two distinct disciplines (ECAD and MCAD) by creating collaboration and shared analysis capabilities is only one step in improving the efficiency of an electronics company’s product development process. There is more to a product than a PCB and an enclosure. There are still opportunities as Mentor continues our focus on the PCB systems design improvements but pursues additional collaboration facilities to other domains. Collaboration opportunities include:
- FPGA/PCB co-design – focus on improving performance at the system level
- ASIC/Package/PCB – optimizing ASIC package and SiP package pin-outs
- PCB to procurement and manufacturing – increasing yields and shortening time-to-volume production
- Collaboration within PCB systems design – concurrent schematics and rules entry, simultaneous design by dispersed teams, RF/analog/digital co-design
- EE to PCB CAD – power delivery systems, simultaneous PCB layout and high speed analysis
John Isaac “Collaboration Across the Product Development Process.”
In my experience FPGA and PCB schematics are done by engineers, PCB layout is a different specialized group, RF/Analog is a separate group, procurement and manufacturing are separate, as is ASIC design. So this new approach may require joint adoption by six groups.
Significant Cultural Issues Between PCB and Mechanical Design
Based on a number of efforts to foster collaboration between Mechanical and PCB design teams in the past, I suspect that there will be significant cultural issues to be worked out to enable real time MCAD/ECAD integration and it’s attendant quality and time to market benefits. Loosely coupled toolsets in both domains allow groups to work more autonomously, even if the schedule impact is negative. Anytime you see a new tool that can redraw decision making and political boundaries, the barriers to adoption have more to do with changes in perceived level of control than shortcomings in the actual solution.
Difficulty of Adoption is Proportional to the
Cube of the Number of Boundaries You Must Cross
I have developed a rule of thumb for introducing new systems: the difficulty is proportional to the cube of the number of “silos” or distinct team/administrative boundaries you had to cross to get to an initially viable solution. For example
- 0 boundaries crossed: only adjust the workflow within a singe team or work group, leaving external inputs and outputs unchanged (except that you hope they have fewer errors or lower latency or can handle more complexity).
- 1 boundary: both sides have to want to change or one group has to be convinced to either supply a new input or accept a different output. This gets attempted unilaterally a lot in the form of
- “if you will only give us this new input our jobs will be easier” If the two groups don’t share a common reward structure there is always a sense of “What’s in it for me?”
- “You have to use our new form/system to make requests” You mean I can’t pick up the phone or send e-mail? Let’s see what kinds of crises get manufactured.
- “We can no longer give you this data or output, our new system doesn’t support it” Well then you may be spending a lot of time doing manual work-arounds until you get that fixed.
- 2 boundaries: 23 = 8 times harder. There are several different ways that three groups can merge. If you can turn this into two pairwise transactions it’s much easier. Only possible if all three unhappy and willing to change.
- 3 boundaries: 33 = 27 times harder. I have only seen four groups come together in response to things like a corporate commitment to pass an ISO 9000 audit or satisfy SOX. Even then it’s much easier to focus on pairwise changes in the context of an overall plan for evolution.
Appendix: Transcript of Altium Ad
Voice over: This is Dave. Dave creates electronic devices. He was having a good day until Ben informed him that the pins on the PCB didn’t match up anymore. Dave is confused because he knows that the spreadsheet that he gave Steve on Friday had the correct PIN changes in it. Steve says that he may have confused the pin numbers a little as he was doing his expenses at the time. This makes Dave a little peeved because now he has to sync up the pins on the board again, and he’ll be late for dinner with his new girlfriend, Bunny.
Later that day, whilst Dave was re-syncing the pins, Rob informed him that the prototype of the device they were working on doesn’t fit into the case that Mark, the MCAD designer, had created after realizing that all four mounting holes would have to be moved in order for the board to fit, Dave had to cancel dinner with Buddy and ask Lenny, his freaky neighbor to feed his ex-wife’s dog, Tutti.
All work and no play was making Dave a dull boy, so when Ben returned to inform him that product management had requested the device have internet connectivity added to the prototype by tomorrow, even though they weren’t sure what it would do when connected to the Internet.
But not to worry, because they had a marketing team working on that. As they spoke, Dave became a little more frazzled and unpredictable than his usual bubbly self. However, it wasn’t until receiving word that Bunny had run off with freaky neighbor Lenny and that ex-wife Stacy had taken out a restraining order on him in order to protect Tutti from his neglect that Dave finally snapped.
Altium, there is a better way.
Talking Head: Once upon a time, physical design esthetic was the bastion of the French fashion industry and, well, Italian sports cars, but not anymore.
Today, the physical experience or look of any product that a customer interacts with is expected to make them feel cool, alive, and sexy. OK, maybe that last part is a bit of an exaggeration, but you get the point. Tomorrow’s successful product will need to do more than just function. It needs to look good.
So just what does this mean for us? More to the point, with so much market energy driving form factors to look cool, how exactly will the electronics team fit their stuff into the proverbial box?
The answer seems simple. Add another dimension.
Several years ago, Altium saw where this physical design thing was heading and how heavily it would affect the electronics designer. First, we did the only thing that any traditional EDA company would do. We denied and avoided the real problem. Instead, we provided the same solution as everyone else. You know, generate the 3d files so you could throw them over the wall to the MCAD guys.
The problem was, we kind of knew this approach didn’t work too well, so after offering the same thing as everyone else for a while, we decided to grow some bollocks, go it alone, actually solve this thing properly.
But what exactly would this entail? Well, for starters, we would need to create a completely new three-dimensional visualization system. A system that could handle the hundreds of thousands of elements in a typical PCB and allow for design rule checking at the PCB design level. You combine this with dynamically linking this 3d model of the product from the MCAD space back into the PCB design space, and do it all in real time. Well, that’s exactly what we do.
It took us a few years to build, but a system that completely replaces the traditional two-dimensional PCB layout process with a fully blown three-dimensional PCB environment was absolutely imperative in order to progress to the next generation of design software. From here, everything else was academic. With the visualization of the physical design brought to life within the PCB space, it wasn’t too big a step to provide real-time 3d interference checking and dynamically linked models in ECAD space back to the models in the MCAD tools. 3d visualization is just one aspect of how Altium is revolutionizing electronic design.
So, if you want to see what the next generation of design tools looks like, we’ve come to the right place.