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The Interdisciplinary Age Concurrent engineering moves from concept to reality. by Laurence S. Liebson

There is an old Chinese saying: "May you live in interesting times." It is a curse, not a blessing. It is a curse that strikes close to home for electronics industry and electronic design automation professionals examining the diversity and rapid rate of change of ICs, packaging, interconnect technologies, design tools, and processes.

Logic designers' productivity has improved significantly over the last 10 years as a result of gains made possible by hardware description languages, logic synthesis, and simulation. IC technology, however, is clearly outpacing the capabilities of current electronics packaging and interconnect technology. Designing electronic products and systems that utilize high speed ICs is a complex process that requires solving an interdisciplinary design problem. Expertise is required in reliability and cost analyses, as well as knowledge of electrical, thermal, manufacturing, testability, and assembly processes.

Yet for all the talk about concurrent engineering and design for manufacture, relatively little has been done to make it easier for engineers to explore the critical aspects of a product's physical design characteristics early in the design cycle. Engineers still pass logic designs "over the wall" to designers, which relegates physical packaging and manufacturability issues to the later stages in the design process. If errors are found, time-consuming design iterations are required that cause delays in time-to-market and consume valuable resources. The competitive demands on companies to bring small, light-weight, higher performance, electronic products and systems to market rapidly is the driving force for a new suite of interdisciplinary design automation tools.

Beneath the tip of the concurrent engineering iceberg, these new tools must complement the traditional CAE/CAD/CAM tool suites to lower the "walls" between engineering, design, and manufacturing work groups.

New physical synthesis tools will allow engineers to explore and optimize the critical aspects of an electronic product's physical design and manufacturability earlier in the design cycle.

New design verification and design data re-synchronization tools will enable changes to be made more easily at any stage in the design cycle within multi-vendor, heterogeneous design environments and reduce the cost of engineering change orders.

New assembly and factory modeling tools will improve the flow of design data information from design through manufacturing.

Improving the design cycle will require new tools that can cross multiple disciplines and support multiple vendor offerings.

Today, many EDA vendors are more open, working more closely together and embracing standards and the unifying glue of those technologies necessary to implement new interdisciplinary EDA tools.

In the future, the best prescription for success requires shortening time-to-market, coping with faster clock cycle challenges, improving quality, and reducing costs. By ensuring your design environment is open, integrating "best in class" tools, and incorporating new interdisciplinary EDA technologies and processes, your organization will be prepared to face what's ahead. May you cope with interesting times.

Laurence S. Liebson is president and CEO of Harris EDA Inc. (Fishers, NY).

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