A Multidisciplinary Concurrent Design Environment for Consumer Electronic Product Design

Abstract

Most consumer electronic products are electromechanical systems consisting of mechanical components such as structures, enclosures, and mechanisms combined with electrical components such as printed circuit boards (PCBs) power supplies wires (harness), and switches The design of such multidisciplinary products involves high coordination and cooperation between the two different engineering fields of mechanical and electrical design However, in spite of the advancements of CAD tool development in design automation technology within each field, a gap still exists for good communication between the designers in these two fields during the course of the design This gap makes the design process of such products time-consuming and error prone This paper describes a research effort that facilitates multidisciplinary concurrent design for consumer electronic products The focus is on how to integrate mechanical and electrical CAD tools into a more flexible and extensible concurrent design environment to share and communicate critical design information during the design process A multidisciplinary cuncurrent design environment based on the CAD framework concept is described Approaches for integrating the design data and information in such a multidisciplinary design environment are discussed A prototyping system for the concurrent design of consumer electronic products is also presented with two preliminary design examples

Creativity in Multidisciplinary New Product Development Teams

“…These observations call for further investigation of intra-team processes, as they suggest communication problems in multidisciplinary R&D teams that seem to differ from the problems frequently reported in the literature on concurrent engineering (e.g. Wang et al, 1996).…”

Concurrent Product Design: A Case Study on the Pico Radio Test Bed

“…Obviously, coordinating all of these designers and ensuring that their designs were compatible was a very difficult problem. While standards and methods exist for designing w ithin a domain, very little work has been done to facilitate designing across domains, Wang being one exception (Wang et al, 1996). In fact, of the three ECAD systems, only OrCAD was capable of exporting a format compatible with MCAD systems, DXF.…”

Collaborative development using EMProDS: The electromechanical product design system

“…Concurrent engineering tools have been successfully implemented in the mechanical [9] and electronic [10] design domains, but little progress has been made towards the use of this approach in electromechanical product design [11]. Recent attempts have been made by Gayretli et al [12] to address this area of engineering.…”