According to Bent Christensen, senior engineer of innovation and prototyping at Bang & Olufsen, "The ideas factory [the company's experimental design team] is where we first conceive future products and where we turn those ideas into prototypes. We design the interfaces, the electronics and the mechanicals earmarked for new products and then test, analyse and see how the prototypes look, feel and work."
The trouble with paradise
There are particular challenges that each designer faces working in the ideas factory. For Christensen, the major one is dealing with all the options and changes in each prototype. Each new prototype is a blank canvas: there's no PCB, no intelligence, no user interface, no external case. "There are so many things that we need to consider when developing our prototypes," he says, "and having the freedom to change over and over again is very important."
Christensen deals with a high level of complexity in his designs. As electronics technology evolves, device packages shrink and designs get faster. The need to manage design complexity can distract the designer from exploring and creating designs that deliver a unique customer experience. So an ideas factory, he maintains, should be about developing innovative designs using inspiration and vision.
Bang & Olufsen claims that each product is designed to dictate new fashions in multimedia equipment. This is a classic case of electronics and mechanical design processes having to work in harmony. But in an ideas factory, which requires creative freedom and a rapid turnover of design prototypes, this might be a recipe for design and management disasters.
Christensen deals with individual mechanical casings, and linking these with the electronics used to be a real challenge. The designers at the Danish company use Altium Designer, which features real-time 3D PCB visualisation (Figure 1). In addition, its STEP file-import capability allows high-accuracy, 3D STEP files to be imported from the MCAD domain into the ECAD space. The once-separate processes come together, allowing the complete product to be modeled and visualised within Altium Designer, in 3D, and in real time (Figure 2). Using this feature, engineers can perform interactive clearance checks between the mechanical and electronic assemblies to test how a PCB fits into its enclosure.
If there are packing violations, changes to the board can be applied in the 3D PCB editor, then the board assembly sent back to the MCAD space as 3D STEP files. This can be done at any time throughout the design process, promoting ECAD-MCAD design cooperation without disrupting the work-flow. This 3D import-export feature can reduce ECAD-MCAD design iterations to a single-clearance checking procedure.
Linking inside and out
Using Altium Designer, engineers can also connect to external company databases and draw footprints directly onto the schematic. The unified libraries allow the ideas factory to maintain custom libraries that are assembled project by project. Engineers can explore and develop ideas without being constrained by existing library data. Independent libraries, which are updated regularly, give the team the exact component models and data they need. "Integrated libraries make it easy to make your own unique components. You can simply draw the footprint and place it on the schematic as you like it, so that it fits precisely," says Christensen.
This whole process, where components need to be changed and redesigned, and designs re-evaluated and trade-offs made, is also eased using the EDA tool. All the design domains—schematic, board and FPGA—share the same, single data model. Changes made to the design, at whatever stage, are automatically reflected in each of these domains with a single key stroke. This method allows design engineers to approach a new design as a single, focused task, rather than a series of interconnected processes. Changes to materials and designs are not encumbered by the usual re-formatting or revision problems that impede development.
Prototype examples
"One example is the touch screen for the Serenata mobile," says Christensen. The mobile phone and portable media player has a touchscreen at the bottom and a selector wheel (Figure 3). "We needed to explore new ideas. For example, we needed to consider power consumption and battery power. After several prototypes and much trial and error, we finally completed the design and made the touchscreen out of glass". Working between traditionally separate processes, these actions are unified at the platform level within the single application-design environment, allowing engineers to explore and develop ideas, says Christensen, as many of the tedious and error-prone processes have been automated.
Figure 1: An example of Altium Designer's 3D visualisation.
Figure 2: Bringing together separate parts of the 3D puzzle helps designers.
Figure 3: The prototype of the Serenata touchscreen mobile constantly changed before production.
