Prototyping and Design
Standards
Winter 2015
ECEn 490
Lecture 10 Prototyping
1
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
2
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
3
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
4
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
5
Prototyping Concepts
Physical
Component
Evaluation
Production
Prototypes
Comprehensive
Focussed
Not Generally
Feasible
Component
Modeling
Analytical
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ECEn 490
Lecture 10 Prototyping
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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
7
Technical or Market Risk
When to build Prototypes
Analytical Prototypes used
extensively
Many comprehensive
prototypes built
Carefully planned comprehensive
prototypes
Often sell the prototypes
Few prototypes may be
built for verification
Very few comprehensive
prototypes built.
Cost of Comprehensive Prototype
Winter 2015
ECEn 490
Lecture 10 Prototyping
8
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
9
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
10
Prototyping Concepts
Analyze your project concepts and decide what prototypes you will need.
Place the prototypes on this chart.
Physical
Comprehensive
Focussed
Analytical
Winter 2015
ECEn 490
Lecture 10 Prototyping
11
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
12
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
13
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.
Winter 2015
ECEn 490
Lecture 10 Prototyping
14