Traditional wisdom dictates that a circuit block library can only be used for detail circuit design. The truth is that the proper toolset and solid creative thinking will also give you the same productivity boost, product reliability, and cost benefits at the architectural planning phase too.

Developing electronic sub-system architectures

The odds are that several to many of the functions you need have already been designed and the ability to tie these sub-system functions to the appropriate logical modules is key to making this happen.

• Access to the same circuit block library that is used by detail design engineering is an absolute must.
• The library needs to be managed:
  • Approval control
  • Read/write access control
  • Easily searchable
• Your architectural planning tool needs to understand the linkage between the function and logical module.
• You need the ability to directly interrogate each logical module for signal interconnects.
• The ability to export a “start point” schematic is a huge advantage.

The video that follows will walk you through:

• How to create a functional block and link it to a circuit block module in the library.
• Interconnecting signals between functional blocks.
• Exporting hierarchical and flat “start point” schematics.

Remember to stay tuned to the Zuken Blog! There is more to come on a similar topic.

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Combining different sources of information

Sometimes I come across people who struggle to understand why translating new product requirements into an initial hardware architecture is frequently such a difficult task. After all, much of the design is frequently pre-existing such as SOCs, reuse blocks, previous-generation enclosures, etc.  So it seems like defining the initial hardware should be a relatively easy process of connecting these blocks together and creating whatever else is needed, right? Seems logical.

But we also know that it’s much, much more difficult than that. Requirements come from many sources such as users, marketing, manufacturers, financial and other stakeholders and they consist of many different attributes such as features, size, weight, battery life, cost, delivery date, etc.

The importance of a cross-functional process

Many professionals have to deal with collating information from different sources to put together plans and make the right investment decisions. But the challenge for hardware engineers or system architects (whomever is responsible for that initial concept creation), is much greater. You might be used to having to deal with all these fragmented sources, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a better way. A way that all your effort can be reused and integrated into the realization of the product. I’m talking about integrating logical design, multi-board 2D planning, 3D space planning and parameter trade-off analysis into a single interface that allows you to make a more informed decision about what features and functions to include or not. Making it possible to simultaneously consider the effects of alternate approaches on functionality, price, performance, size, weight and other targets with very little time and effort.

I guess seeing is believing, and to save copious quantities of words, I figured you might just find it easier to check out one of our webinars that shows how this works in reality. The webinar is called “Creating and Optimizing a Hardware Architecture.”

In this webinar, you’ll be walked through a typical example involving designing a power supply and you’ll see how this cross-functional approach of electronics hardware architecture planning can be simplified.

As a prerequisite to this, you can also watch the webinar introductory webinar on this topic entitled “Hardware Architecture Design and Validation.”

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What’s the Big Deal about Architecture Design?

Product complexity is driving the hardware design process evolution. And product complexity is being driven by product miniaturization, IoT, design reuse, security, complex packaging, high density packaging, etc. It’s a long list. The result is that detailed design process is converging into a system-level design abstraction and the overall process is extending upstream into model-based systems engineering (MBSE) and hardware architecture design. The increasing product complexity no longer allows us to leap from requirements to detailed design; we need to better define the system, optimize the hardware architecture and then move to detailed design.

The need for hardware architecture design and optimization stems from the risk that if you enter detailed design with an architecture flaw (e.g., board won’t route so we need to add a board or enlarge the board, board(s) won’t fit in the enclosure, the product weighs too much) you may not be able to recover. During a recent webinar, one of our polling questions uncovered that fact that 92% of the audience had experienced a PCB fit problem with their enclosure. That’s an architecture failure, not a detailed design failure. In other words, a z-axis collision between a tall component and an enclosure is a detailed design fix, but if changing the shape of the PCB or the enclosure is required to avoid collisions, that is an architecture design failure.

Planning Flow

Zuken’s System Planner performs hardware architecture design and optimization across four disciplines:  functional design, PCB planning, space planning and various parametrics that include weight, cost, power, etc. Here is a synopsis of the architecture planning flow:

1. System Planner starts with the functional block diagram and that can begin with the schematic of the current version. Most new product designs starts with the current design.
2. Add functional blocks from your library or create a block with a partial BOM as a place holder. You can add the schematic later.
3. Assign the functional blocks to different PCBs and analyze routability.
4. Move functional blocks from board to board to optimize layout and signal integrity.
5. Make sure the boards fit in the enclosure and that the parametrics (e.g., cost, weight, power, etc.) meet product requirements. You can also map requirements to functional blocks or boards for traceability.

But Wait, There’s More!

System Planner 2017 has added support for wire harnesses. So now you can design board interconnect in the form of a flex board with a wire harness. More of the discipline convergence I mentioned earlier. Once you have optimized the multi-domain design, the boards move into CR-8000 as a multi-board system. The harnesses move into E3.series for detailed design. No data re-entry required. The integration is seamless.

Hardware architecture design is becoming a competitive requirement as product complexity is on the rise and the room for error is shrinking. You may not be able to squeeze much more productivity out of your detailed design tools, but you can feed them with higher quality designs. Sound interesting? Check out this page and request a hardware architecture design and optimization demo.

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