High-quality hardware design: how do you achieve it? We discussed the first part, the definition phase, in an earlier blog. In the second part, we focus on the next phase of hardware design in product development: guaranteeing specifications. Using our own process, we explain how you can ensure that hardware requirements arising from the system architecture are translated into a high-quality design.
A high level hardware design
The first step is to create a high level hardware design. You use traceability from engineering requirements to design decisions. This way you ensure that the design meets all engineering requirements. The design is assessed both internally and externally. Because this is the most creative part of the hardware development process, you want to start the feedback cycle as early in the process as possible.
Draw up detailed design and schedules
Then the detailed design and schedules can be drawn up. Again, this is not a ‘big-bang’ approach. It is an iterative process with a lot of internal feedback between the engineers. It starts by discussing how a circuit works and ends with a formal review of the schematic. We use the Altium 365 ecosystem for the review process. This makes it possible to place comments and tasks directly in the schedule. For this review and every comment or task we use this flow: