Tooling up- a better way

27 November, 2009

Take for instance the notion that the first thing to do is choose the major devices around which you will base the design. Routine and precedent has it that you select the processor, the major peripheral chips and, increasingly, the FPGA. It's logical, you argue, to set these choices in concrete early on because these decisions will help dictate the direction of the design, and how can you possibly design without direction and definition? The properties of these devices prescribe the boundaries in which you will design, so that the process becomes safer and quicker.

The paradox here is that the start of the design process is when you are in the worst position to know what boundaries are acceptable and what devices are most suitable. Most of the time you have to estimate (an engineering term for 'guess') how you will implement the functionality you seek, and base your device choices on these guesses.

We often comment that we are forced to make these guesses because exploring lots of different devices and design implementations up front costs time and

money. One of the reasons for this is that for every device you need to acquire the infrastructure to evaluate and 'play' with it. While there is a hard cost associated with this infrastructure, by far the dominant cost is the time taken figuring out how to do your first development on a new and foreign system. And sometimes you have to 'waste time' evaluating the different evaluation systems for a particular device (there're usually loads of application-targeted ones available) to see which one best suits the application!

The overall effect of this initial tooling up process is to distract you from the real aim of the project, which is to develop functionality. And it puts early constraints on the freedom to 'play' with various devices and design approaches before deciding on a final approach.

This latter point is a crucial one. When we take away the freedom to easily explore ideas, the first casualty is innovation.

You then find that it is too time-consuming and too expensive to tool up for each device you want to explore, so you artificially restrict your choices. In doing so, you perhaps miss out on potential benefits that the latest devices and technologies can offer.

The problem here, particularly creating tomorrow's connected designs (which are the ones that people will want to buy) is that you're doing design backwards.

Take a higher level, holistic view of the aims of the entire product design experience. Reassess the design processes you use and how they map into today's technology and your customer's needs.

This leads to a few fundamental concepts that challenge the status quo. Forget the hardware and start with the software, where the functionality lies. Remove the constraints the old approach imposes on exploring innovative solutions. Move to design systems centred on the soft domain, but without any particular allegiance to any particular device, so you have a design sandbox with which to innovate, explore and evaluate your design ideas

This holistic approach to electronics design lets you explore ideas at a high level, where the underlying hardware complexity is automatically dealt with by a high level of design abstraction. In such an environment, the required hardware and devices are simply 'plugged in' to the system when needed, so you can remain focused on developing innovative functions in the soft domain.

Now you can remove the cumbersome 'tooling up' process that delays and constrains the traditional design process. By using software layers to disconnect the design from the hardware and devices on which it resides, this single tool environment becomes the centre of the product design process, regardless of the underlying hardware.

Imagine also the benefits of interfacing this single, centralised design system with a 'plug and play' hardware development system that allows you to quickly swap between devices and peripheral hardware at will. Since the matching tool system isolates the design from the underlying hardware, making the core design portable, the overall development system can be independent of device and vendor.

The result is a single, flexible design environment that does not force you to choose hardware and 'tool up' at the beginning of the design cycle. These choices can happen down the track, when the design's functionality has been developed to a point where suitable devices, peripheral hardware and even development boards can be plugged in and explored.

With this approach, you are working with a single design environment that centres on the vital 'soft' core of electronic product design. Design becomes a holistic process that allows you to consider the entire product and its user experience, exploring different design ideas and technologies on an unrestricted, blank design canvas.

Such a design environment frees you to develop the innovative functionality that leads to unique, competitive products. You can get on with the real job without tool or hardware constraints, using a single centralised system and one consistent design interface. Tooling up is no longer an issue, design options expand, and the potential to explore new technology is now wide open. Welcome back creativity and innovation in electronics design.