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Design for Manufacturing : 3 cardinal rules for industrializing your circuit boards under the best conditions
06 March 2023
LACROIX Electronics
How to ensure the quality, deadlines, and reliability of your electronic boards during their industrialization? The secret lies in Design for Manufacturing (DfM). In this article, delve into the heart of manufacturing processes to understand the crucial importance of DfM. By following three golden rules, discover how to optimize each design step for a successful product. Are you ready to unlock the keys to a successful industrialization?
Table of contents :
- What is Design for Manufacturing, or “DfM” ?
- The 3 cardinal rules
#Rule 1 : Anticipating manufacturing and inspection constraints right from the start of the design stage
#Rule 2 : Making your product more reliable by focusing on the right partner
#Rule 3: Invest at the beginning to gain throughout the product lifecycle
What is Design for Manufacturing, or “DfM”
This support solution, offered at the same time as the product development cycle, is designed to facilitate and improve the reliability of every stage of industrialization before mass-producing electronics assemblies.
DfM comes into play upstream of the product life cycle. Ideally, it should be implemented before the design phase of an electronic product, throughout the prototyping and pre-production phases, all the way through to its final production.
Strategic anticipation in the industrialization cycle
Anticipating each stage of the industrialization cycle makes it possible to ensure the best possible production follow-up. All the constraints generated by the chosen design techniques must be controlled so as to very quickly assess all the advantages and disadvantages.
This analysis makes it possible to target the ideal design as early as possible and thus optimize production lead times as well as the quality and reliability of the future product. The Design for Manufacturing service offered by LACROIX makes production more reliable by drawing on all the experience acquired by our experts.
The impacts of technical choices on production and the importance of Design for Manufacturing
Certain technical choices result in the use of specific manufacturing processes while prohibiting others, which can sometimes lead to assembly issues or make it impossible to automate certain inspection tasks. These constraints can have consequences on costs, the risk of assembly defects, scrap rates, or even the level of production quality and reliability.
It is therefore advisable to involve Design for Manufacturing experts as early in the project as possible, ideally when performing functional analysis, before moving on to technical production choices.
Under these conditions, the synergy between design services and production facilities is optimal. Conversely, by introducing DfM after this crucial stage, the teams then have to adapt the production means to the product design. This situation is less advantageous and generally leads to additional delays and costs to overcome technical obstacles.
Rule 1 : Anticipating manufacturing and inspection constraints right from the start of the design stage
The synergy between human expertise and cutting-edge software
At LACROIX, the combination of our electronics production engineers’ expertise and the use of the ultra-efficient VALOR software allows the teams to be fully efficient.
Design for Manufacturing experts use this software as an essential medium to deepen their analyses with greater efficiency.
This highly advanced inspection tool and its very important interfacing software improve cooperation between R&D designers and product manufacturing workshops.
Strategic advantages of VALOR
VALOR reduces the time required to perform analyses, based on a set of manufacturing rules derived from electronics standards combined with LACROIX’s extensive manufacturing experience.
It allows experts to propose strategic changes, such as modifying the design of the circuit board or integrating new components. This software makes it possible to instantly share any and all customer constraints, thus facilitating the relevance of all LACROIX recommendations.
Rule 2: Making your product more reliable by focusing on the right partner
“Thanks to our tools and expertise, we are able to inform our customers of design defects that had not been previously detected. The artificial intelligence behind the VALOR software that we use allows us to integrate all our criteria so that it is increasingly efficient. This way, our analyses are more exhaustive, better automated and faster to implement. By mastering this tool, we can offer our customers an optimal Design for Manufacturing service.”
Rule 3: Invest at the beginning to gain throughout the product lifecycle.
By adopting the principles recommended by the DfM support solution, it is possible to adjust the design of a product to facilitate its assembly, reduce the risk of defects that may appear during its use, and thus guarantee its reliability throughout its life cycle.
Some public procurement contracts apply penalties that can be very costly depending on the original defect rate; hence the importance of choosing the best manufacturing processes to secure production.
The Design for Manufacturing service is an advantageous support solution that runs simultaneously to the industrialization cycle. Far from making processes more cumbersome, the experts mobilized actually act as facilitators at each stage of industrialization.
Discover the DfM offer
Unlike some DfM initiatives on the market, the support offered by the LACROIX teams is provided through to the launch of mass production. Design for Manufacturing does not end at the pre-production stage: changes are recommended during this stage and monitoring continues throughout the prototyping phase, then from small-series production to mass production.
To enjoy all its benefits, it is key to integrate Design for Manufacturing as early into the process as possible. Using in-depth analysis methods and this comprehensive, tailor-made monitoring solution, under the guidance of LACROIX’s teams of DfM experts, allows you to optimize the quality, cost and production lead times of your electronics assemblies.
Do you want to learn how to optimize product quality at the best cost? Discover the article dedicated to Design for Test (DfT).
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