It is time to rethink and redefine regulated electronic design and lifecycle management.
Altium has sponsored this post. Written by Josh Moore, Altium.
We live in an age of rapid innovation and technological advancement driven by electronic products that are reshaping society and the world around us. At the forefront of this technological revolution, successful enterprise companies and their design organizations work vigilantly to stay ahead of the ever-growing sophistication of electronic devices, the challenges of product development and the complexities of system integration.
But that vigilance is being severely tested. The industry has crossed an inflection point as it struggles to manage and overcome crucial electronic product development deficiencies that companies must address to maintain future success.
While everyone knows this, they face several bottlenecks, especially in the electronics design domain. The first is the lack of an electronics hardware design and native lifecycle management system that can connect and manage every aspect of electronic hardware development within the electronics development domain, throughout the larger product development process and across key business systems. The second bottleneck is inadequate and inefficient approaches to regulated electronics hardware design within highly regulated industries that require high reliability, secure infrastructure and strict adherence to compliance standards.
Nowhere are these more obvious – and problematic – than in the automotive, medical and healthcare, aerospace, aviation and telecommunications industries, which must achieve product compliance while maintaining complete control throughout an electronic product’s development journey.
Unlike the electronics domain, the mechanical and software domains benefit from an array of lifecycle management tools and solutions that are fine-tuned for their design domains, development processes, lifecycle management and compliance requirements. But the electronics domain lags severely behind, relying on fragmented, patchwork solutions that are ill-equipped to handle the more pronounced intricacies and nuances of modern regulated electronics design. This ultimately hinders progress and expectations.
So knowing this, it is time — a necessity, in fact — to rethink, redefine and reimagine regulated electronic design and lifecycle management. It must be transformed from an ad-hoc, piecemeal solution for “ECAD” design into a native and fully integrated system aligned with the specific challenges of regulated industries and seamlessly integrated into and throughout the entire product development process.
Status-quo — Status-no
Looking back at the history of progress within product development environments and domains, it is obvious that the electronics domain has been left behind. Compared to its mechanical and software counterparts, electronics hardware design – especially regulated electronics hardware design – still finds itself fractured and uncoordinated, restrained by tools and methodologies that have long outgrown their ability to adapt to increasing design complexities and evolve with changing regulations and compliance processes. Ironically, in a world defined by smart devices, integrated platforms and time-saving automation, the design and lifecycle management of the very electronics hardware that enables these is hardly innovative, often disjointed and, in some cases, woefully inadequate.
The consequences of the status quo for companies and design organizations are real. As electronic products and development processes in regulated industries become more complex and product development more reliant on larger teams of people across multiple domains, their development cycles extend. Delays creep into production schedules. Costs and resources are no longer optimized. And supply chain and manufacturing teams have to grapple with mismatched or outdated information.
Couple all of that with the internal and external needs of regulated industries, including high reliability, secure infrastructure and strict adherence to compliance standards, and the electronics domain looks to be even further behind. Compliance and verification processes are slow and complicated to track, ECAD information lacks transparency and the domain is disconnected from the broader enterprise.
What should be a streamlined, collaborative, integrated and compliant process across the entire regulated product development process is an arena of inefficiencies, miscommunications, delays and risks.
Our inflection point has become a choice. Either we continue relying on incremental improvements and applying “band-aid” solutions to a system and processes that need a significant overhaul, or we adopt a proactive, compliant-centric approach and develop a native, purpose-built lifecycle management system for electronics that fully addresses the challenges and complexities of modern, regulated electronics hardware design.
The obviousness of it all
If the choice seems obvious, then why has the demand for a native, compliant-centric design and lifecycle management system for the electronics design domain remained faint? It is mainly due to the legacy of “tradition” and the inertia of “good enough.”
The economics of electronics design software have often favored short-term productivity improvements over long-term innovative solutions. Yes, ECAD design tools have been upgraded over and over. Yes, incremental improvements in integrations, data management and processes have been made. However, the entire electronics lifecycle management and compliant-centric development process are still fundamentally structured around outdated practices, unmanaged methodologies and product-centric alternatives.
Electronics engineers have little choice but to use design applications and data management tools developed in an era when the complexities of electronics data, regulated development processes and complaint data management were more or less manageable. While welcome and valuable in their time, these upgrades and improvements have failed to keep pace with the growing demands of today’s regulated industries for modern electronics hardware development.
Consider for a moment the contrast between electronics hardware development and software development. Over the past few decades, engineers in the software domain have benefited from the evolution of Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) solutions and Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) models. DevOps, Agile and continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines have transformed how software is developed, tested, deployed and maintained. Software engineers can trace every line of code, every commit and every decision from conception to deployment with granular accuracy. They can work collaboratively across distributed teams and processes while maintaining a unified view of the entire project.
These ALM solutions are specifically designed to handle the complexities and unique needs of software development and lifecycle management while being intelligently integrated with PLM systems to ensure synchronized development, change management and traceability across the broader product development process. They streamline compliance management by providing centralized repositories, end-to-end traceability and managed workflows. They enable cross-functional collaboration, real-time visibility and audit-ready documentation, ensuring alignment with industry-specific standards that reduce risks, simplify audits and support organizations in delivering regulatory-compliant applications.
By contrast, electronics hardware designers often find themselves juggling disparate tools and collaborating across domains that rarely speak the same language, let alone integrate intelligently and seamlessly. Over the decades, the absence of a native lifecycle system and compliance management for regulated electronics has meant relying on existing product lifecycle management (PLM) systems and a mishmash of ad-hoc solutions designed primarily for physical product-level development and management.
Many companies have employed and come to rely heavily on these systems as they can be effective to a certain degree, guiding development and design teams from the initial concept and design through to the end of a product’s lifecycle. However, a fundamental disconnect exists between the capabilities of these existing product-centric systems and the unique needs and understanding of regulated electronics hardware development and electronics lifecycle management. Unlike most physical products, electronics require a level of detail and integration that existing PLM systems were never natively designed to handle. The impacts of this are increasingly profound and tangible, affecting everything from design and data integrity to process efficiency and, ultimately, product quality.
It is time to envision a future where electronics hardware designers can enjoy the same efficiency, collaboration and traceability as their mechanical and software counterparts. The future is a system built from the ground up, specifically with electronics in mind — a dedicated, native and compliant-centric electronics lifecycle management (ELM) system that can seamlessly integrate and address the complexities of electronics hardware development.
Such a system would not merely be a bolt-on solution to existing tools but a complete reimagining of how electronics products are conceived, planned, designed, managed and integrated across the entire development process and lifecycle.
Envisioning the future
A native ELM system would go beyond merely collaboration and tracking throughout the development of electronics hardware. It would be capable of understanding and managing the nuances of electronics design data, which includes not just the physical design but also the electrical characteristics, requirements and the broader system context in which it will operate. It would allow for a deeper integration of design, simulation and verification processes, enabling real-time feedback, traceability and iteration across all stages of development.
For instance, in the early stages of design, electronic engineers must make critical decisions about component selection, power distribution and signal performance. A native ELM system could provide intelligent suggestions based on historical data, industry trends and real-time supply chain information. This level of integration would help design teams avoid the costly mistakes that often arise when design decisions are made in isolation, without a complete understanding of their downstream or long-term impacts.
A native ELM system would not only track electronics hardware from its conceptualization to manufacturing; it would also serve as an intelligent, adaptive framework for the entire product lifecycle. Such a system would offer native version control for designs, component libraries updated in real-time to reflect availability and pricing fluctuations, automated checks for compliance with regulatory standards and simulations that factor in the full range of environmental and operational stresses a design might face. Most importantly, it would offer an integrated, electronics-centric platform for collaboration between product, design, verification, manufacturing and supply chain teams — breaking down the silos that currently exist between these disciplines.
Answering the hard questions
Of course, transforming the role of lifecycle management and design organizations that would adopt such a system for electronics hardware design would not be without its challenges. It will require a cultural shift within companies and organizations accustomed to working with “traditional” methodologies and “good enough” solutions. Yet the rewards far outweigh the risks.
At this point, it would be remiss not to mention that enterprise companies, regulated or not, are indeed designing, developing and getting products manufactured and out to market. But at what cost? How many problems, delays, and re-spins are avoidable? How much inefficiency and compliance risk is acceptable? How many band-aids and patchwork solutions are necessary to make “good enough” actually good enough? When it comes to existing design solutions and lifecycle management systems, are they actually ready for the future of electronics hardware design?
But the real question we should be asking ourselves is not whether we can afford to develop such a system, but whether we can afford not to.
Altium has recognized this and knows the answer — an answer that will lead to the next wave of electronics development innovation, fundamentally transforming the way we plan, design and manufacture the electronic products that are reshaping our world.
Let’s make sure we’re ready for the future – leaving nothing to chance.
To learn more, visit Altium.
About the Author
Josh Moore is currently Director of Product Marketing, Enterprise Solutions at Altium, with over 25 years of experience in the electronics and PCB design industry. Prior to joining Altium, Josh was the Portfolio Director for the PCB product line and ecosystem technologies at Dassault SOLIDWORKS and spent 14 years at Cadence Design Systems as the Product Director for the Allegro and OrCAD PCB products and technologies.
