The IT Product Development Process: A Hardware Design Flow

It is the megatrend in today’s digital connected world, each and every personal gadget from palmtop, smart cellular, game set top box, to wearable devices, is getting thinner, lighter, shorter, smaller, and, of course, low power. The global competition and shorter product life cycle post a major challenge to the product development. It is getting harder to meet customer’s demands on time because customers want the products to be done as early as possible. The reason is simple: competitions are so high and the technology advances are so fast. The result is the product life cycles are much shorter than they used to be, which in turn drastically reduce the window of opportunity that a product can create a successful penetration to the market and generate the maximum return from the design and development effort.

Because the time to market is very short for a new product introduction, the development of a new product is often started too hastily, no development plan, do not follow the golden process flow, no thorough reviews, incomplete test cases, waive bugs, etc., so engineers and developers have to repeat what they have done to fix things, in the end everything takes much longer than it should be. A good design flow can reduce time to market; meanwhile improve product’s quality.

The purpose of writing this hardware design process flow is to ensure that, by following a high quality process, the developers shall possess the highest quality of products while maintaining a competitive schedule and a lower cost structure.