ROBUST ELECTRONIC DESIGN
Up-Front Investment
Robust Electronic Design requires you to take a "cradle-to-grave"
viewpoint of your project, preferably starting from the earliest stages of
development. This requires deep, intimate knowledge of, and access to
information about, a broad range of technical topics:
- Bypassing and decoupling.
- Cabling.
- Components and materials.
- Design of high-speed electronics.
- Electrical design.
- Electronic design.
- Hardware/software integration and test.
- International electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) requirements.
- International electromagnetic immunity (EMI) requirements.
- International electrostatic discharge (ESD) immunity requirements.
- International power requirements.
- International product safety requirements.
- International telecommunication requirements.
- Manufacturing/test/repair processes.
- Mechanical design.
- Power distribution.
- Power supplies.
- Printed circuit board (PCB) layout.
- Publications (user manuals, technical manuals, repair manuals,
webpages).
- Rapid prototyping techniques.
- Signal integrity.
- Software design.
- Thermal design and testing.
- Your company's current design/manufacturing/test/repair capabilities.
- Your company's customers and their needs/desires.
- Your company's Field Service capabilities.
- Other areas unique to your company's product lines.
Because of the breadth and depth of knowledge required, Robust Electronic
Design usually requires a cross-functional team (CFT) to help guide the
development effort. For an electronic product, to be sold or leased to
others, the CFT should include members from (or representing):
- EMC/EMI/ESD.
- Field Service.
- Hardware development.
- Integration/test.
- Manufacturing Engineering.
- Marketing.
- Product Assurance.
- Product Safety.
- Publications.
- Quality.
- Software development.
- Test Engineering.
- Thermal.
- Outside consultants, as needed, to fill in any gaps.
For electronic equipment, to be used inside the company, the CFT should have
members from:
- Hardware development.
- Integration/test.
- Manufacturing/Field Service groups that will be using the equipment.
- Product groups whose products will be developed/ manufactured/ tested/
repaired/ calibrated/ maintained with the equipment.
- Safety department.
- Software development.
Robust Electronic Design, Inc.
is the research arm of
dBi Corporation,
an EMC testing and consulting
company based in Lexington, Kentucky. Our staff has been directly involved in
putting over 110 major products into mass production at Sycor,
IBM, and
Lexmark. Our specialties include:
- Designing for safety and reliability.
- Designing for manufacturing/test/repair.
- Designing for EMC/EMI/ESD.
- Designing for flexibility.
We have over 29 years experience designing/developing and putting products
into production, supporting them in the field, and killing them off when they
become obsolete. Our experience spans over 32 types of CISC and RISC
microprocessors and microcontrollers, from the original Intel 8008 up through
1.26GHz Intel Celerons and Pentium III's. We have developed products with a
wide range of semiconductor memories, from EPROM's up through 133MHz SDRAM's.
We have developed products with a variety of local-area network (LAN) and
peripheral interfaces, including Ethernet, IDE, IEEE 1394 (FireWire),
LocalTalk, MODEM's, parallel, PCI, serial, Token-Ring, and USB. And we have
used chipsets, ASIC's, FPGA's, and PAL's from a number of vendors to glue
these pieces together to make them work.
Robust Electronic Design, Inc. and dBi Corporation may be
contacted by:
- E-mail at
jrbarnes@iglou.com
- Fax at (859)252-6128.
- Phone at (859)253-1178.
- Snail-mail at
Robust Electronic Design, Inc.
216 Hillsboro Ave
Lexington, KY 40511-2105
OR
dBi Corporation
216 Hillsboro Ave
Lexington, KY 40511-2105
Last revised March 2, 2002.
