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16 The PCB Design Magazine • September 2015 feature A most critical factor is the design team. You need technically skilled PCB designers who can envision the system as a whole and cope with the challenge of ever-increasing limitations and constraints. In this newly created environment, they have to understand not only the logic and electrical behavior of the system, which used to be the key requirement, but also the mechanical and electro-magnetic requirements, stemming from fitting the boards into the hous- ing. Designers will have to test and simulate system functionality and conformity at logical, electrical, mechanical and, increasingly, at EMC levels. Systems Design Flow Implementation Tools implementation should begin with the learning phase, which entails familiariza- tion with the individual design tools. I would start with those new tools that directly replace the legacy tools as they are discharged, only because this allows for faster learning, com- parisons and benchmarking. Gradually, new tools should be integrated into the design flow, until the designers master the entire suite of tools. The learning curve entails not only the learning effort itself, but also a cul- tural shift, for inertia always takes care that changes can be made only incrementally. Fi- nally, along with the designer mindset, you will need to change the company culture up to the point when the new tools become for everybody, not only for the designers, a neces- sity, rather than a luxury. Well, now you have your hands full because the real implementation work can begin. You need to run test cases for each new tool and ap- plication segment. It's best to begin with the ones that you are familiar with from previous work, like designing schematics and designing boards. Verify how well the new tools work for each application segment. The next step would be to integrate those test cases into the design flow, which now becomes a hybrid with a com- bination of legacy and new designs. By repeat- ing this step for each of the other tools in the suite, the legacy design process will be gradu- ally transformed into a new design process. For a useful evaluation of this work, it becomes crit- ical to correctly assess and then measure how much effort is required to: • Configure each tool to fit into the design process • Bring designers up to speed for using the new tools • Migrate legacy designs to the new tools, without interfering with design and production • Find out how the third party tools, needed for supporting additional functions, can be integrated into or replaced by the new tools After testing and validating all tools of the suite, you need to validate their interaction. This time around, focus on the specific features that support the system design approach, such as the electric diagram for the system as a whole, the method for assigning schematic blocks to different boards, and the ability to move com- ponents or groups of components from one board to another. In addition, run the various checks you are familiar with from the board level at the system level, verify how all the boards fit into the hous- The automotive Sector, by the numbers Automotive Electronics • The global market for automotive elec- tronics is expected to reach $314.4 billion by 2020, with an estimated compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 7.3% between 2012 and 2020. • The OeM automotive electronics sector accounts for an estimated share of 86.3% in 2013, which equals to $165.2 billion in the overall automotive market. This segment is expected to reach $277.1 billion by 2020, a CAGR of 7.6%. • in 1950, automotive electronics made up 1% of a car's total cost; by 2000, that figure had jumped to 20%. That percentage is ex- pected to reach 35% by 2020, and 50% of to- tal car cost in 2030. AuToMoTIvE SySTEMS DESIGN: A SuPPoRT ENGINEER'S PERSPECTIvE