Prototype to Product

Chapter 3. How Electronic Products Are Manufactured

Back  in the 1980s, a family friend went to work as an engineer at a major American automaker. Her first assignment was to fix a little problem: an engine part had been designed so that it fit properly in the engine once it was in its correct place. But, unfortunately, there was no way to get the part into its correct place during the manufacturing process. So the engine couldn’t be built in the factory.

Oops.

It’s easy to chalk off this misfire to the general shoddiness that pervaded the American auto industry during those days. In fact, I’d wager that this kind of thing rarely happens at auto companies today, thanks to better CAD tools, rapid prototyping, and smarter processes. But variants of “we can’t actually build this” happen all of the time in product development, and the resulting redesign/redevelopment efforts to address the problems can be costly and frustrating.

This chapter presents an overview of the process typically followed during the factory production of devices that contain electronics and have simple mechanical parts, products like computers, smart phones, or wearable sensors. (Products that have more complex mechanicals, such as cars or heart-assist pumps, will follow processes that are broadly similar but far more complex.)

Since manufacturing occurs at the end of the product development cycle, it might seem out of place to have this chapter at the front of this book rather than toward the end. But there’s ...