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Design for Manufacturing - the cardinal rules for industrializing your circuit boards under the best conditions
06 March 2023
LACROIX Electronics
Design for Manufacturing (DfM) offers a means to optimize the quality, delivery times and reliability of your product. To fully grasp the value of this comprehensive, tailor-made monitoring solution, Joël Malville – DfM Expert and Process Development Manager at LACROIX – explains the importance of mastering every single manufacturing process and its consequences before designing a product.
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.
Anticipating manufacturing and inspection constraints right from the start of the design stage
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.
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.”
Making your product more reliable by focusing on the right partner
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.
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.
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”
This software makes it possible to build an analysis model that is enhanced by the expertise of the teams that use it. Its capabilities allow for the delivery of manufacturability studies capable of revealing all the anomalies and potential defects of a given design. These analyses take into account all the parameters systematically integrated by the experts upstream. These experts are then responsible for checking their relevance and correcting critical points by submitting proposals to their customers for changes to the initial design.
“DfM support process takes place over the equivalent of five to ten days for the most common projects. The reasons for using DfM are not always conditioned by the quantity to be produced or the size of the components. It all essentially depends on the level of complexity and reliability to be guaranteed, according to the nature and purpose of the product”
Joël Malville, DfM Expert and Process Development Manager
Initial investments that lead to gains throughout the product life cycle
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.
“We may lead the DfM project on our French site, but all our other sites based in Tunisia, Germany, Poland, the USA and Mexico carry out the same monitoring processes. All these sites benefit from an experienced DfM expert, notably trained in the use of the VALOR software.” explains Joël Malville.
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 comprehensive, tailor-made monitoring solution in order to allow you to optimize the quality, cost and production lead times of your electronics assemblies.
To understand how product quality can be optimized at the best cost, read about Design for Test (DfT).
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