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72 I-CONNECT007 MAGAZINE I JUNE 2026 Marcy LaRont: Kristin, this month we're focusing on potential substantive dif- ferences between old-school and new-school thinking. Specifically, let's talk here about concurrent vs. co-design. Can you define both and give an operational example of each approach being implemented? Kristin Moyer: Concurrent design has always meant that the multiple different silos of design—mechanical design, electri- cal design, etc.—are happening simultaneously but in their own silos: The mechanical engineering team designs the enclosure, and in parallel, the electrical engineer does the circuit design and PCB layout with just a basic concept of the enclosure and the mounting. Then, they get together at the end of each design phase to review how all the pieces fit together. If they don't fit, it's back to the drawing board for the affected design groups. This is one of the reasons for revision cycles in product development. Isn't that a logistics challenge? It is. A major drawback of concurrent design is time and flow issues. It requires that the different aspects or disciplines of design be carried out in order, which creates many start-stops for individual designers. For an RF product, for example, the regular PCB designer has to stop their work and hand the design over to the RF engineer, who can then continue laying out the board. Once it comes back, the designer continues from where the RF engineer left off. Do the CAD data suites used to date for PCB and system design contribute to this dynamic? Yes, historically, CAD tools have provided a single data file for each specific thing that is designed. Let's say your system has three PCBs. Each board has its own specific design engineer, yielding three individual data files. Those data file formats were based on different design disciplines, especially MCAD vs. ECAD, which used data designed for electrical use, such as two-dimensional drawings. Whereas ECAD or MCAD was designed for mechanical struc- tures and contained a lot more defini- tions for mechanical parts and mech- anisms that weren't supported in ECAD tools and vice versa. Modern CAD, ECAD, and MCAD tools have become more tightly integrated. As software and oper- ating systems have become far more powerful, we now have the capability for multiple tools to simultaneously read ECAD, MCAD, and thermal analysis data, and so on, back and forth. We can have a single live dataset that is acted upon simultaneously by the various disciplines. Concurrent design isn't a perfect system, but until recently, it was the only way we could operate with many different moving parts. Primarily due to ad- vances in our design software tools and their abil- ity to integrate, co-design has become possible. Yes, data system capabilities and formats have been a huge contributor to this operational dynamic in hardware and system design, and their advance- ments will support this shift in total system design. It sounds like you're now talking about co-design. Yes, co-design, in contrast to concurrent, is where we integrate the different aspects or areas of a product or system design within a single design cycle from the beginning, both from mechatronics and operational points of view. The data is integrated; there is a single dataset for the product or system being designed. It lives in all the tools simultaneously and can support multiple engineers across disciplines. Engineers can work on the same dataset simultaneously, significantly reducing design cycle time. The RF engineer from the previous example can be working on their section of the layout and routing at the same time as the PCB layout engineer is working on the digital and analog routing sections. What are some other significant benefits of moving to a co-design operational model? There are three. As I mentioned, there is a schedule or time benefit. I no longer have to delay the ECAD Kristin Moyer