Winter 2015 ECEn 490 Lecture 10 Prototyping 1 Prototyping and Design Standards

Winter 2015 ECEn 490 Lecture 10 Prototyping 2 Iomega HipZip Case Study History: 1998 events Iomega had been successful designing and selling the Zip drives, but sales had begun to fall. They were using the “razor and razor blade” product concept. The media was the big money maker. Their core technology was designing contact recording heads that could “fly” over flexible magnetic discs. Marketing was trying to get into another mass consumer market. Engineering prototyped a miniature Zip like drive, code named Clik! Clik! had a 40 MB disc capacity in a PCMCIA Type II card slot. What other product ideas come to mind? Engineering prototyped an audio player called HipZip built around the Clik! mechanism. Analyze the product potential. What are the strengths, weaknesses?

Winter 2015 ECEn 490 Lecture 10 Prototyping 3 Iomega HipZip Case Study Cont. What steps would you take in developing a product build around this technology? In depth customer needs evaluation! Thorough competitive benchmarking! What did the development team miss? The semiconductor technology was continuing to improve areal density at the rate of ~ 2X every 18 months. (Moore’s Law) There wasn’t a simple source for generating music content. Actual results; Product was introduced, but never really went into high volume production. Product was dropped within 9 months due to lack of market interest. Estimated that this project cost Iomega over $25 million

Winter 2015 ECEn 490 Lecture 10 Prototyping 4 Prototyping Concepts A Prototype is “an approximation of the product along one or more dimensions of interest.” What are prototypes used for? Learning. How well does it meet the customer needs? Communications. Help to visual the product or key components. Integration. Ensure that the components work together as planned. Milestones. Illustrate that the product has reached a certain level of functionality.

Winter 2015 ECEn 490 Lecture 10 Prototyping 5 Other uses of Prototypes Often we don’t know enough about the final design. We may be using a new technology that hasn’t been proven. We may have two or more concept alternatives that are “too close to call”. You may have designed an expensive subsystem that requires a long lead time for fabrication.

Winter 2015 ECEn 490 Lecture 10 Prototyping 6 Prototyping Concepts Physical Analytical Comprehensive Focussed Not Generally Feasible Production Prototypes Component Evaluation Component Modeling

Winter 2015 ECEn 490 Lecture 10 Prototyping 7 Why not prototype everything? –Costs prototypes can be a major development cost 10,000 unit prototype run!!! –Time it takes time to build prototypes and time to evaluate them. –Risk prototypes often don’t represent the final product, and decisions made on prototype performance may be wrong.

Winter 2015 ECEn 490 Lecture 10 Prototyping 8 When to build Prototypes Technical or Market Risk Cost of Comprehensive Prototype Analytical Prototypes used extensively Carefully planned comprehensive prototypes Often sell the prototypes Very few comprehensive prototypes built. Few prototypes may be built for verification Many comprehensive prototypes built

Winter 2015 ECEn 490 Lecture 10 Prototyping 9 How to save time by Prototyping –Identify long lead time assemblies that are part of the critical path –Prototype in parallel with actual part development –Use prototype to help detect unanticipated design problems. You can’t model everything. –Most prototypes allow the designer to make quick changes.

Winter 2015 ECEn 490 Lecture 10 Prototyping 10 Prototyping Concepts How do you keep your project from being caught up in the “hardware swamp”? (prototypes that do not really contribute to the goals of the project. Define carefully what each prototype will be. Purpose. Why are we building this prototype? Level of approximation required. How close do we need to come to the final design? What experiment are we trying to perform, and how does the prototype fit into this plan. Develop a schedule for construction and test. Prototype with a plan

Winter 2015 ECEn 490 Lecture 10 Prototyping 11 Prototyping Concepts Physical Analytical Comprehensive Focussed Analyze your project concepts and decide what prototypes you will need. Place the prototypes on this chart.

Winter 2015 ECEn 490 Lecture 10 Prototyping 12 Design Standards What are ‘Design Standards’? Specifications or values that have become generally accepted as common for similar designs. Where did they come from? General use, industry committees, market success, government agencies, etc. List some examples. How do they impact your design? Are Design Standards a constraint or an advantage to the designer?

Winter 2015 ECEn 490 Lecture 10 Prototyping 13 Design Standards Assignment for the final report. Include a section in your final report that includes a list of the industry standards that impact your project, and how each standard affected your design.

Winter 2015 ECEn 490 Lecture 10 Prototyping 14 Homework Assignment: Continue to work on the project schedule. It will be due Tuesday Feb 17th. Also, begin to look at a Test Plan for at least one of the major design criteria for your project. This should include the test set up, procedures and expected results Next lecture is on “Managing your boss” or How to survive in any work group.