In recent years it’s become extremely difficult to keep a product in active manufacturing without interruption. Products have always needed sustaining manufacturing engineering to manage component sourcing and ongoing quality assurance programs, but disruptions to global integrated circuit supply have made this exponentially more difficult.
Many of our clients find themselves pulling more and more of their development engineers off of new projects to triage chip shortage issues in their existing product lines. This can often delay the release of upcoming products, which in turn increases the sourcing issues on the new product as well, as long development cycles make component management even more difficult.
RedRidge can help you keep your existing products in smooth production, without having to cannibalize your other projects to constantly fight fires with components going out of stock. We support a variety of electronics supply chain consulting projects, all focused on efficient engineering support and improving the position of the design going forwards. We have deep experience in component sourcing, alternate part qualification, fast turn-around layout tweaks, and regulatory testing.
Alternate Part Qualification
When a PCB component goes out of stock, and the manufacturer lead-time would cause unacceptable production stoppages, the best-case scenario is that a drop-in compatible alternate part can be specified. If this is possible, it means the design can be updated with Bill of Materials (BoM) only changes, and the electrical schematics and physical PCB layout do not have to be modified.
This is a great position to be in, as it’s the minimally-invasive option, and carries less risk than if more involved design changes were required. However, care still needs to be taken. When swapping out a component on an active production design, the updated circuit will likely see large volume production much faster than an initial prototype would. When prototyping a new product, iterative prototypes are typically designed and tested at increasing quantities as the design matures. But when modifying an active design under urgent time pressure, the updated circuit may see large volume production runs right away.
Drop-in, footprint compatible parts are typically not exactly the same as the original – and validation must be performed to ensure a quick swap to a ferrite bead doesn’t cause the product to fall out of FCC compliance, or a swapped MOSFET doesn’t cause a switching power converter to overheat.
RedRidge has experience in rigorous component change validation, which can help quickly select alternate parts and mitigate these risks. We always recommend going beyond on-paper analysis, and can physically modifying existing units of your product to incorporate the new components, and take them through comprehensive performance and compliance pre-screen testing.
PCB Layout Modifications
When no drop-in, footprint compatible, alternate components exist, the next resort is to modify the PCB layout to accommodate non footprint-compatible alternates. These modifications can vary widely in difficulty, depending on how different the new footprint(s) are from the old, and if there are associated circuit changes required to support the new parts.
To avoid delays, it’s critical the layout designer is experienced with making minimally invasive in-place modifications, and can avoid cascading changes across the design. Doing this effectively requires a combination of circuit and layout design experience. When PCB space is tight, the replacement part selection, and any associated circuit-modifications, need to be done strategically, and specifically designed to fit into the existing space, signal routing, and power distribution network. For a simplified example, a circuit update which will require a different supply voltage, which isn’t already distributed to that region of the PCB, can cause widespread and cascading layout changes.
RedRidge offers extensive PCB Layout Services, and prioritizes tight integration of circuit and layout design, which is ideal for modifying existing designs. We have deep experience in making these types of sourcing-driven layout tweaks, and help you get your design updated quickly and without turning into a large undertaking.
BoM & Sourcing Risk Analysis
Once one sourcing crisis has been solved, the logical question for any technical manager to ask is, will this happen again? And, how big is the business risk to this product form ongoing chip supply issues?
Unfortunately, the IC supply situation is bad enough that for any low to mid volume product which sources production components through stocking distributors (ie, Mouser, Digikey, etc.), the component supply risks are likely quite extreme. We have seen a pattern where super-high volume manufacturers, like major automotive companies, who normally purchase entirely manufacturer-direct are starting to buy out stocking distributors when they encounter a supply hiccup. This is a difficult situation for small and midsize companies. These major manufacturers are such large buyers, that when they turn to smaller distribution channels in a pinch, a chip which is healthily in stock with 20,000+ units in stock at distributors can go to 0 in stock in a single day.
RedRidge has a routine process for BoM and Sourcing analysis which we perform regularly on all of our full turnkey product design projects. And we also regularly perform this service for our clients existing designs. The goal is not only to assess the sourcing risk of every component, but to pre-emptively select and qualify alternate parts. We can take an existing in-production design and get you to having 3+ pre-qualified alternate parts for every component, ideally with supplier and geographic diversity. Doing this work ahead of time can substantially reduce the risk of production halts, and helps resolve crises before they happen.
For more unique components like microcontrollers, FPGAs, and specialty ASIC’s (which are typically the highest risk factors), it’s often the case that convenient alternates simply may not exist – or if they do, they’re all in the same product family from the same vendor – which is not ideal from a sourcing diversification standpoint. For these scenarios, we have experience in a variety of more involved risk mitigations such as pre-emptively implementing firmware platform portability, or pre-emptive layout modifications and the addition of extensive Do-Not-Populate (DNP) layout fallback options. Involved pre-emptive measures like this are something that was rarely done 10 years ago, but in recent years has paid massive dividends for companies which invested in code portability and hardware flexibility ahead of time. The automotive and consumer electronics industries have been recent striking examples of the major market share swings that occur when one competitor has nothing in stock and another is able to continue production.
Design For Sourcing Enhancements
If you’re company is starting a product refresh, or a new clean sheet design – it’s the perfect opportunity to review the design for sourcing improvements. Samll design choices, which are extremely cheap to make at design time, can have huge impacts on the difficulty of implementing various sourcing modifications down the line.
Simple things, like selecting MOSFETs, diodes, and LDOs, in industry standard standard packages rather than unique ones (of which there are unfortunately many), can massively increase the odds of resolving future sourcing issues with BoM-only changes. Thorough addition of cheap 0 Ohm resistor jumpers and DNP footprints on unused IOs can also pay large dividends down the road when a component needs to be swapped – potentially opening the design up to a much larger pool of drop-in compatible parts.
Design time is also the best opportunity to asses high risk-factor components, like microcontrollers and FPGAs, and their firmware/HDL implementations. Depending on the choices made around selection of software/firmware frameworks, choice of RTOS API, encapsulation of vendor provided library/driver layers, and choice of FPGA IP cores – designs can either be quite portably right off the bat, or inextricably entangled with vendor-specific code.
RedRidge regularly does cooperative design with our client’s in-house engineering teams, and also offers stand-alone 3rd Part Design Review, which can be a great way to find easy risk mitigations at the start of the products lifespan, while allowing your team to stay focused on their core design work.
Maintaining Regulatory Compliance
Almost any product sold in the western world has to pass some kind of compliance tests prior to widespread commercial sale. These requirements range from basic UL and Intertek safety & fire testing, to FCC intentional radiator compliance, and much more. In highly regulated industries like medical devices and aerospace electronics development, designs are often driven by stringent compliance requirements from the outset. This creates challenges when an active production design, which has already been certified, needs one or two minor components swapped out. Does the product need to be re-certified at the compliance lab? Does any engineering change paperwork need to be filed with the regulatory body? Are there ways we could accomplish the update which would trigger or not trigger the need for re-testing?
RedRidge offers a variety of Regulatory Testing Support services for electronics products, as well as in-house EMI/EMC pre-screening, and has experience with wide range of regulatory standards across multiple industries.
If you need help implementing design changes, and navigating the regulatory compliance that comes along with, don’t hesitate to give us a call.
Why Choose RedRidge
Dedicated electronics supply chain consulting groups also offer similar services, but often lack the technical depth to actually identify and qualify drop-in viable components, and have a reputation for bombarding your design team with requests to confirm the viability of vaguely similar parts. Furthermore, with how difficult the chip supply situation has become – keeping a design in production often requires technical intervention in the form of layout or firmware modifications.
RedRidge Product Development is a full hardware design house, so our sourcing and manufacturing support projects are handled by the same electronics and firmware design experts that drive our new product development and R&D programs. We pride ourselves on pulling off difficult in-place design modifications with minimum necessary deltas, and keeping products in production without forcing widespread redesigns.