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20 The PCB Design Magazine • September 2015 feature In addition, involve your suppliers in solv- ing those issues and problems that cannot be handled internally by the design support team. In the transition period from legacy to the new design flow, the challenge is augmented when the same design support team needs to provide support for the ongoing developments, while introducing the new tools. The team has to continue supporting designers who use the legacy tools to achieve objectives and hit dead- lines. At the same time, they have to champion test cases and pilots and identify tool configura- tions that best fit the design process in place. They also have to train designers who are in the process of switching to the new tools and sup- port the daily activity of those designers who use them already. Generally, design support needs to cover the entire community of users. In this case, we have thousands of designers across many locations in most of the industrialized countries. Barriers created by nearly as many languages and cross- cultural hurdles need to be overcome. For sim- plification, a good advice is to limit the number of internally used languages, with English func- tioning as the lingua franca. Flexibility turned out to be the paramount requirement for the new development environ- ment. We have chosen an open tools suite, for it provides the needed customer adaptation flex- ibility. Further, each tool needs to be adapted to the company design and manufacturing pro- cesses. Moreover, the tool suite needs to adapt to a broad variety of electric systems as well. Adapting the tools suite to the company pro- cesses has revealed that some of the required functionality is not included in the native tool suite. This creates the need to provision for in- cluding such functions as add-ons not only for current, but also for future needs. In terms of implementation, in an ideal world you would like to use the tool suite as it has been delivered. It is well known that this is how tools work best. However, if you already use legacy tools and you need to keep up with real design and manufacturing needs, it is im- portant to transition smoothly from the legacy to the new tool suite. For the transition phase, we have decided to replace the legacy tools in a selective sequential mode into the design flow used presently. Know exactly where the tools are compatible and where they are not, and configure the environment so that it is support- ive of an incremental transition to the new tool suit. Thus, design support has to demonstrate flexibility in assisting designers throughout this transition phase. Moreover, design sup- port needs to take ownership of the changes to best advise pilot team designers how to achieve goals and hit deadlines. These transition efforts, as well as specif- ic circumstances, have more clearly revealed the amplitude of the challenge to cover all the design support tasks with the present team. Bringing design engineers up to speed is a lengthy, laborious and tedious process. To work as a team, in addition to the technical skills, design engineers have to develop soft skills to blend into the team and company culture; a dysfunctional team is a counterpro - ductive team. It became obvious that the ex- isting technical support team will have to be enlarged, both in terms of number of people and skills, to keep up with the transition work. The expectation is that support engineers act as the catalyst for both requirements, which points to key additional job requisites for fu- ture candidates. The automotive Sector, by the numbers on the Road Today • nyC is the only locality in the uS where more than half of all households do not own a car. in Manhattan, the figure is 75%; nation- ally, it's 8%. • in 2012, 254,639,386 light duty ve- hicles were registered in the uS, along with 8,190,286 vehicles with 2 axles and 6 or more tires, 2,469,094 vehicles classified as "truck, combination," 8,454,939 motorcycles, and 764,509 buses. • in 2001, 70% of Americans drove to work. • As of 2011, the median age of all uS ve- hicles was 10.8 years. AuToMoTIvE SySTEMS DESIGN: A SuPPoRT ENGINEER'S PERSPECTIvE