A Concurrent Design Architecture for Electronic Product Design and Test

Concurrent Design (CD) has been applied in space missions and systems designs since the European Space Agency (ESA) evaluating the benefits of CD towards assessment studies as part of future space missions. In 1998, the European Space Research & Technology Centre (ESTEC) Concurrent Design Facility (CDF) was established to perform concurrent assessments of space missions. CDF approach is an alternative to the traditional design methods due to its abilities to address deficiencies such as, lack of synergy among design teams, inefficient design cycle, lack of systems-level perspective and developing a completely consistent design process. Research institutions, industries and universities using CDF/CE have reported better results than traditional methods for end-to-end space missions and space systems design projects. Commercial product design/manufacturing sectors are important to our global economy too, so CDF/CEF methods should also be expanded into these sectors. This should helps meet market windows, lower product costs with improved quality and reliability. In this respect, more engineers are required to be trained in CDF focusing in automotive and electronic products designs for production. This paper provides high level description of early CDF architecture, electronic volume production line architecture, and integrate the relevant parts of both to derive an enhance CD architecture. Next, the working principles of the main testing platform to capture production defects will be presented in order to show the benefits of incorporating design-for-testability (DFT) especially in the early CDF design phase, before providing an adaptation of this enhance CD version, suitable for education. This aims at familising students in the process of application of specific domain disciplines including design-for-manufacturability (DFM) and design-for-testability (DFT) for volume production.