Custom Design - Why Would You Not Outsource?
Best practice
A good design house will always supply a design specification, which confirms a base line for the technical and commercial requirements. This should be submitted for formal approval, prior to commencement of any further work. Project plans are tabled demonstrating how the company is going to achieve the required time scale, and significant milestones of the project - design specification, schematics, layout and prototypes which should all be formally signed off by the customer.
The provision of a 'lifetime' warranty for the product keeps the design house on standby to assist should component obsolescence require design modifications. To the client this really means that they have quantifiable costs and a responsive outsourced engineering 'department' which means they can focus on the business that they know best.
Can this approach really work?
This is all very well in theory – does it work in real-life? DSL has done such custom design for a number of clients, one of whom is the market leader in producing reference instruments for surface finish, forms and profile measurement.
A number of years ago, they embarked upon an ambitious plan to update their product range, and sought a design partner with skill set which embraced not just processor board design but driver and application code generation under a real time operating system.
Of particular challenge was to provide a level of hardware integration, which would reduce the technology residing on three full size PC I/O cards to a size less than that of a single PC I/O card, yet still include the essential processor elements.
The company’s market research had already determined the enclosure size and form and thus the final single board layout also needed to consider limits and interfaces in all three planes.
DSL's engineering team met with the customer to review the requirements and presented a plan to meet both the commercial and technical demands of the project.
This level of integration was in part satisfied using an FPGA and the extensive use of surface mount parts freed much of both sides of the PCB for component placement.
The CPU requirement was satisfied using BGA variants of the AMD SCnn range of X86 of integrated processors. Other technologies incorporated were Irda, Flash, PCMCIA interface, RS232, RS485 and power management circuitry.
The operating system chosen was Accelerated Technologies Nucleus Plus which functions well on a small memory footprint and is royalty free.
Having successfully achieved the objectives on this project DSL was asked to undertake a further five designs embracing similar technology.
So for an OEM to outsource its custom design doesn’t cost more, removes the ongoing design overheads from an OEM’s business and provides an economic, risk free method of resolving project overload or resource shortage. A specialist job such as custom design needs a specialist to do it effectively – why would anyone choose not to?
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