Arrow Technical Services - CEM Feature Article New Electronics Magazine

DESIGN SOLUTIONS SIMPLIFIED

Arrow Technical Services has developed its electronic design solutions to simplify and speed up the process of turning a good idea into a fully field-proven, market ready production design for its customers.

The company, which designs technically advanced products for high volume manufacture, recognises the fact that individual products have individual design requirements and have therefore developed a common product design methodology which systematically simplifies the process into common development stages.

Each of these stages is in effect an individual ‘mini project' with clearly defined aims and objectives, forming part of a coherent plan that can be seen by the client every step of the way and more importantly can be used to gauge the progress being made towards the finished product design.

Right from the outset, the engineering team at Arrow Technical consider the volumes and production requirements of each product design, helping to ‘productionise' it at this early stage. In addition, the company deliberates how the product is likely to be manufactured and what can be done to streamline this process.

Because Arrow Technical is often responsible for manufacturing the actual product design, it ensures that it makes the products efficient to manufacture by bringing in its production staff at an early stage. This enables them to check how a design is evolving and whether it fits comfortably into the manufacturing process.

‘Future-proofing' the design at the very start of the process is considered by questioning where the product is going and what a Mark 2 or Mark 3 variant may have to do. Arrow Technical uses increasingly more programmable components and fewer fixed function or passive components, which means that after hardware design release it can still continue to develop and enhance the functionality and capability of the product without the time and expense of a hardware redesign.

Avoiding ‘designing in' potential production problems is another consideration and paramount to the overall success of any new product design. Issues such as production volumes, product life-cycle, component availability, obsolescence, component count, build cost, complexity and speed of build are all highly important issues which should be considered and designed in from day one.

As there is usually a trade-off between product volumes and design time, Arrow Technical makes sure these issues are settled and objectives defined well before any final product concept is finalised - if this is left until the first prototypes are working, which unfortunately is far too often the case, then it is too late.

Latest advances in technology are playing their part in simplifying the design process as well. The move towards more miniaturised component packages is allowing engineers to compress product designs into smaller spaces where size was once prohibitive. Increasingly sophisticated modular IC's means that Arrow Technical can design complete systems much faster than ever before. It is now moving towards a more ‘Systems Engineering' approach to its product design, rather than one where products are designed at component level.

Fortunately the price of programmable components has also fallen dramatically in recent years allowing Arrow Technical to employ sophisticated microcontrollers in relatively mundane applications, without additional cost considerations. This often speeds up the design process and reduces the overall component count.

Dr. Chris Worrall, managing director of Arrow Technical Services commented: ‘Through our experience of hundreds of product designs we have a good idea of what can and cannot be reasonably achieved. Sometimes we are asked to develop some really exciting new technology which is outside the usual parameters of product design. For these circumstances we have a special high risk development cycle where the client is kept well aware of the possibility of failure, and progress and costs are very carefully monitored to ensure neither run out of control.'

He added: ‘With projects like these we always concentrate on the ‘impossible' things first and we don't spend much time on the ‘do-able' which would be wasted if the high risk component of the project were to fail. Only when we are on sure ground do we get started on finalising the Concept Design and push on to make the prototypes.'

Arrow Technical Services was established in 1995 and began producing customised electronic controllers for aerospace applications. Since then, it has gone on to design and manufacture products and systems for the automotive, scientific, industrial and consumer electronics markets for clients around the world. Its Design Methodology is at the heart of its ISO-9001 accredited quality management system.