A MULTIDISCIPLINARY CONCURRENT DESIGN ENVIRONMENT FOR CONSUMER ELECTRONIC PRODUCT DESIGN

Most consumer electronic products are electromechanical systems consis ting of mechanical components such as structures, enclosures, and mech anisms, combined with electrical components such as printed circuit bo ards (PCBs), power supplies, wires (harness), and switches. The design of such multidisciplinary products involves high coordination and coo peration between the two different engineering fields of mechanical an d electrical design. However, in spite of the advancements of CAD tool development in design automation technology within each field, a gap still exists for good communication between the designers in these two fields during the course of the design. This gap makes the design pro cess of such products time-consuming and error prone. This paper descr ibes a research effort that facilitates multidisciplinary concurrent d esign for consumer electronic products. The focus is on how to integra te mechanical and electrical CAD tools into a more flexible and extens ible concurrent design environment to share and communicate critical d esign information during the design process. A multidisciplinary cuncu rrent design environment based on the CAD framework concept is describ ed. Approaches for integrating the design data and information in such a multidisciplinary design environment are discussed. A prototyping s ystem for the concurrent design of consumer electronic products is als o presented with two preliminary design examples.