Design data management. PCB configuration management.
Release management. Procurement data management. It seems that any term in the
electronic design process with “management” in the title strikes fear and
loathing into the hearts of most average board level designers and engineers.
That’s because management in a design context has typically equated to significant restrictions imposed on designers, and a phalanx of additional hoops and red tape to negotiate in order to get a design into production. And that’s the last thing a designer needs when he/she is trying to come up with creative solutions to a design problem with a deadline looming.
But managing the plethora of data that contributes to an electronic design is crucial to a successful outcome. As most engineers know too well, small discrepancies at a schematic or source code level can cause and inordinate amount of troubleshooting and rework pain down at the pointy end of a project. And let's not forget about the money wasted on prototypes sunk not by design issues, but by data glitches on the way to manufacture.
So all these “managements” are an essential part of getting an electronic product from concept to production. The real question is, what’s the best way deal with data management issues from a designer’s perspective, without stifling creativity?
Dealing with the big issues
The upcoming Release 10 of Altium Designer, currently in its Beta testing phase, marks a turning point for Altium in answering this question. Release 10 will bring a number of structural changes within the product that will make a real and practical difference to the way designers and engineers can manage all aspects of the data associated with their designs, and collaboration with everyone involved in the design, manufacturing and production process.
This all sounds a bit scary, but it really isn’t. Altium’s approach to tackling the issues of electronic product development has always been to look at the wider problems from a designer’s perspective. That means we look outside the traditional ways of thinking and try to enhance our design environment to accommodate additional functionality in a way that seems ‘natural’ for board level designers and engineers.
For example, in Release 10 we have extended the use of version control within the environment to create a way for designers to easily formalize the release of their designs for prototyping, testing or full manufacture and production. We’ve separated design data from released data within the environment so that you have complete freedom to make changes and follow ‘what if’ scenarios in your project, while maintaining the complete integrity and traceability of files and data that have been released outside the design sphere. And each time you mark a critical milestone, a new release can be generated and automatically secured in the versioning system. All the tools and management controls necessary for this are within the design environment, so they are easily accessible and easy to use.
This creates minimal disruption to your design flow and minimizes any distractions you have from the task of design. At the same time it takes away the burden of having to manually organize your design output data and keep track which versions of which files were released to the manufacture for prototyping.
Unifying the data model
The key to system’s user friendliness is Altium Designer’s unified design database combined with versioning infrastructure deployed with the product. Because Altium Designer is not a collection of point tools, but a truly unified design environment, the process of managing the underlying design data can be intelligently automated across all design domains, eliminating the need for complex data translation and management processes that need to span multiple design databases. This leads to a system that feels very ‘lightweight’ in use, but is completely scalable and equally usable by just a single engineer, or an entire design team within a large enterprise. Design data can be managed as files and folders on a hard disk, or as fully redundant managed design repositories over a corporate network. From a designer’s perspective, the system remains natural and easy to use.
One thing that’s very clear to everyone involved in electronic product development is that things are getting more complex every day. The technology, the manufacture, the marketplace and even the customers are becoming increasingly sophisticated.
The road forward
Today it’s routine for design work to be done in one location and manufacturing in a completely different part of the globe. And parts can be procured from all corners of the earth. Today consumers demand that their products not only work as advertised, but can connect to the big wide world over the internet and be updated with the press of a button. This new electronics landscape is putting extreme pressure on current design methodologies and processes. To move forward we need to get smarter about how we develop products.
And that’s what Altium Designer is all about - no more so than in the upcoming Release 10. We want to take these big, scary concepts and make them useful and useable assets for the designer, rather than a burden. In this way, we can give all designers and engineers, regardless of the size of the company they work for or the resources they have at their disposal, an environment in which design creativity and innovation can flourish, yet be in harmony with the constraints dictated by formal design, data and release management needs.
To see video demonstrations of some of the features and concepts coming in Release 10, visit our Release 10 preview page.
