Cultivate the common cause
We’ve learned though experience that defining products and design specifications in detail upfront yields great benefits.
Dick Meaney, Analog Devices -- EDN, November 1, 2004
Electronics manufacturing has long been a global effort; now, electronics design is following suit. The reason is simple: The ability to design high-performance analog and digital signal-processing ICs is a specialist skill. We’ve got to find the engineering talent for it—wherever it might be—and consolidate it into design centers. Analog Devices has 33 such centers around the world.
Aside from the search for talent, design has become a global activity, because putting technical resources in our key markets is also a business imperative. You want to be able to provide technical IC-design expertise locally. A local presence lets us better define products with our customers and help with the needed system-partitioning engineering. That way, we develop the best product definition and value proposition for the customer’s cost-performance targets.
If far-flung design teams bring the benefits of access to a wider pool of talent and a quicker response to customer needs, they also bring obvious management challenges. No doubt about it, there’s a greater need for explicit or formal communication when the designers are not in one place. Net meetings, documentation and e-mailing replace the informal communication that takes place across the table when a team works together at a single site.
We’ve learned though experience that defining products and design specifications in detail upfront yields great benefits. In fact, we’ve learned it the hard way. In certain cases, there’s a tendency to delve into the block level and generate the components before the system specification and architecture are complete.
So a key part of creating a globally dispersed product-development team that works well is making sure that all of its members understand the challenge at hand. It requires that the lead architects and designers spend a lot of time upfront documenting the product specification and making the partitioning decisions, which allows the team members to understand how the functional segments will connect to achieve the final design.
Then, very early in the product-design process, we invest the time and travel necessary to ensure that the design-team members know each other and share a common understanding of the problem they must solve.
Another key is the set of CAD, EDA, and database-management tools. In addition to the design information, it is critical that IC process descriptions, simulation models, and verification tools be location-independent, so that the engineers consistently validate the design. It’s the combination of the critical simulation and validation models and the CAD tools that allows engineers to share databases and converse across time zones by wire.
Also, the CAD tools and the software environment force a sort of standardized language on a global team. The design methods people use can vary, but the validation techniques must be common across the team to ensure a robust design. This step provides a good platform for ironing out any misconceptions about how the work should proceed.
Even with a properly organized project and a clear product specification, customers’ opportunity windows and the ongoing race against competitors demand the willingness of team members to put in extra hours and accommodate evening or early-morning conference calls with remote sites to keep everything in sync. Finally, good communication between development engineers and the customers’ engineers helps to ensure the delivery of a product that makes innovative trade-offs across product complexity, cost, and time.
