SUPPLEMENT THE INTERNET OF THINGS MULTIDISCIPLINARY DESIGN TOOLS
Lawrence Romine, global head of field marketing, Altium, explains how PCB design tools must now support multidisciplinary teams to enable IoT product innovation
T
he Internet of Things (IoT) is a driving force behind all market segments, and
is actively creating brand new opportunities for business. Users want to be connected and have convenient access to their personal content anywhere, anytime, on all devices. However, the demand for these unified product experiences is not necessarily mirrored by a unified design experience on the development side.
As businesses rush to meet these
demands, the need to adopt multidisciplinary design solutions continues to grow. Research group Gartner predicts that 25 billion connected devices will be in use by 2020 with an economic impact of $1.9 trillion USD. (Gartner, 2014) This begs the question: what is happening in the field of mechanical design to bring new products to life faster? The MCAD market is shifting toward
serving end applications that are adding more intelligence to products with power, sensors, computing intelligence, and connectivity via protocols like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Incorporating a PCB that makes these products “smart” is becoming increasingly important. Overall, mechanical design and PCB design are irreversibly on a collision course. There is already a shift toward
multidiscipline MCAD design tools that moves away from a design focused approach. This software enables designers and engineers to define a product despite the complexity of different design environments. Moreover, this increase in complexity is
also driving the need for simulation technologies which must be easy to use by non-experts as part of the unified design experience. Otherwise, the design process itself does not support the development pace dictated by the new IoT market. This enables the integration of design stages, fewer processes and less platforms to develop a product. The multidisciplined segment is expected to increase to a 63.62% share of the Global MCAD Software market by 2018. As the industries gear up to ship nearly 25 billion devices connected by 2020, innovations in electronic design and manufacturing will be required to
S6 JUNE 2017 | ELECTRONICS
fuel the next wave of innovation. (TechNavio, 2014) • Connectivity and intelligence are
quickly becoming a requirement in everyday products and experiences. • A Printed Circuit Board sits directly in the centre of enabling this intelligence and connectivity. • The MCAD market is evolving away
from tools focused solely on design and towards more multidisciplinary design solutions. As your existing and potential customer
base moves increasingly toward intelligent connectivity, are you ideally positioned to address the new Key Market Drivers and Key Market Challenges? According to TechNavio, key market drivers include: • Reduction in product design and
development costs • Reduction in product development time • Increased adoption of 3D product
models and virtual product development environments And, key market challenges include: • High training costs • Need for continuous support and
maintenance • Collaboration between ECAD and MCAD design workflows
The most pressing key market challenges and drivers (below)
Multiphysics has now entered the mainstream (bottom)
The multidisciplined segment has been rising since 2013, and is expected to continue to grow
More importantly, are you offering a
solution that appeals to your customers’ needs and requirements? The days when products were strictly
mechanical are rapidly coming to a close as products continue to become more intelligently connected and complex. PCBs will be employed in nearly all of these products to facilitate that intelligence and connectivity. IoT is not just for consumer goods.
As companies attempt to capitalise on these market trends, the typical market pressures of time to market and reduction of costs, both design and product, become even more crucial to success. The result is that customers are performing better when they adopt new design practices that: • Make an increased use of 3D product
models that facilitate virtual product development across both PCB and mechanical design elements. • Seamlessly integrate mechanical design
elements and the necessary intelligence and connectivity elements. • Enable the use of advanced
technologies, such as simulation, by non- experts as an integral part of the design experience. Additionally, these market pressures are pushing companies towards tools that are multidisciplined. This shift in focus changes the design process for a more collaborative approach that utilises the multidisciplinary team. Multidisciplinary design solutions create an extremely efficient professional unified workflow that allows designers to focus on designing rather than managing a collection of design tools. We are preparing for the future and supporting multidisciplinary teams today. Our goal at the end of the day is to give engineers access to the very best PCB design tools and enable the next wave of IoT product innovation.
Altium
www.altium.com
/ ELECTRONICS
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