Ian Wilson, Principal Electronics Design Engineer at Linn Products, knows a thing or two about precision and responsiveness in design. Ever since its release of the Linn Sondek LP12 turntable in 1972, Linn Products has been one of the major players in high-end audio systems.
In an exclusive interview with Altium, Ian Wilson talks about how to keep information flowing from conception to layout to finished product, and how to keep the music flowing faithfully from the musician to the listener.
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| Linn DS system. Image courtesy of Linn Products, UK |
For the past 35 years Linn Products has promoted the notion that in order to faithfully recreate music, each component of the audio system must also be faithful to the music.
The idea is to ensure fidelity along the whole audio chain from the source – the original music recording itself – all the way to the loudspeakers. Linn accordingly produces an entire line of music products ranging from higher-than-CD-quality (DS) network music players as well as the iconic LP12 analogue turntable product, to pre-amplifiers, power amplifiers and award winning loudspeaker products.
Linn Products’ belief in 'Music for Life' for its customers and its fully integrated design and manufacturing philosophy helps it differentiate itself from its competitors in the high-end audio systems market.
According to Principal Engineer Ian Wilson, “Many other competitors go out to make hi-fi systems, systems that create impressive dynamics, whereas Linn tries to recreate the music as the music should be – not just in a hi-fi way.”
Linn Products’ approach to meeting these standards involves conducting all its own design in-house, from circuit boards to metalwork to assembly and testing. This level of integration creates its own unique set of challenges, and Altium Designer has helped make Linn’s design process manageable so that the engineers are free put their focus where it should be: adding value for their customers.
“We chose Altium Designer three years ago,” says Wilson. “We had previously been using a CAD package that was constructed from two separate entities, the schematic capture and the layout package. There was no real clear way to link the schematic information to the layout, so it ended up being pretty much a full-time job developing a tool set that would allow this level of interaction to take place. We were spending more time maintaining the tool set than actually being creative in design.”
Wilson found Altium Designer’s unified platform approach to be much easier to integrate into his design flow. “The flow of information from schematic to layout and ultimately through to design is seamless. It integrates into the business database, which allows us to create the materials rapidly.”
Because all of Linn Products’ design, manufacture, and shipment are done from the same location, this level of integration is pivotal to Wilson’s job as an engineer. “It allows us to get accurate information to our service team for populating the boards. We can verify Gerbers before we send them off to the PCB manufacturer. All of these things give us more time to basically be engineers and be more creative, and that allows us to make better products for our customers.”
The output job feature, says Wilson, “is a very useful tool that we can just click and almost forget. We know it’s going to generate a consistent and accurate set of output files that my colleagues on the business systems side can access. It’s consistent and reliable.”
Out the Door in 24: Reliability Means Speed
Linn Products is able to use this information to run an efficient production environment. Linn does not keep a backstock, but rather builds products to order, from assembly and testing to shipment. “If a customer places an order with us, we will satisfy that order within a 24-hour time period,” Wilson says. Once an engineer releases an output file, it’s available to all stages of production, including the manufacturing, business and purchasing areas.
This degree of speed means the engineers need accuracy at all levels of the design flow, so that errors will be immediately evident onsite – meaning same-day accountability and traceability for any error. Altium Designer helps Ian Wilson ensure that the information is accurate and accessible at all levels of design and production processes.
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| Linnn Klimax DS Digital Stream player. Image courtesy on Linn Products UK |
Wilson has also
found Altium Designer’s schematic capture features to be extremely useful. “We
re-use many core elements that are performance and feature critical to Linn, so these are all
separate schematic sets that we can re-use and re-implement effortlessly into
the designs.” Because the engineers have access to centralized, integrated
libraries, says
Standardizing the templates and allowing for the re-use and re-arrangement of different functional blocks ends up allowing for more flexibility in design, according to Wilson, and the top-down design view lets him understand the design better. “We’re able to identify the key functional blocks that are going to be required to get the net result.”
Essentially,
knowing that one can re-use various functional blocks allows Linn Products to
focus just on the new, differentiating parts of each new project. “The net
result,” says
Wilson’s team has also benefited from the online community in the Altium forums. “It’s something that Linn ourselves do with our own forum so that our customers can interact directly with the engineers and each other, so that they can bounce ideas and thoughts around each other’s heads.”
The idea behind electronics forums is that other people may already be at work on the same engineering problems you are also facing. Wilson puts it simply: “Why limit yourself to just a small team of half a dozen engineers when there’s a world full of engineers all willing to share their ideas?” Also, information gained in the online forum, such as simulation and 3D models, can then become part of the central database for Linn Products. This database can be shared in turn with others outside the company. “So the more information we can consume like a giant sponge, then the better the shared models will ultimately become.”
Chips on a canvas
“We want the toolset to basically be a blank canvas for an engineer – an area to explore their thoughts and their ideas, and rapidly develop those and take them through to products and prototypes,” says Wilson. “We think Altium is heading in these directions by being more integrated.”
But in order for the engineers at Linn to have the freedom – and the time – to be creative in their designs, they need tools that allow them to not worry as much about the nuts and bolts of the process flow. This, according to Wilson, is the real benefit to using Altium Designer.
“When everything flows seamlessly, the engineers are a bit more relaxed, and the designs flow. A project that flows from start to finish has a better net result than a project that stops and starts and is always struggling to get completed.
The net result according to Ian Wilson: “Better electronic systems designs, realized via a smooth flowing integrated toolset, allows our team at Linn to focus on the highest quality music products for our customers.”
