”In another survey, “PCB Design: Improving Profitability with PCB Design Best Practices”, 44% of the respondents find that: “Frequent design changes is one of the major challenges in PCB design which leads to delays and increase in project management cost if not managed properly.” What magnitude is design variant management a challenge in the industry? In a recent survey by Aberdeen Group, “Importance of Configuration Management in Industrial Equipment Manufacturing”, 47% responded: “Market demand for customized and complex products is one of the top pressures they face during product development. Altium Designer can synchronize the workflow automatically. However, companies often have worldwide teams responsible for a single project, so variations in one part of the product may lead to errors and unsynchronized changes in another during the product lifecycle. A single reference design for all variations rather than to create a new variation from scratch yields quicker design completion and costs less. However, with the complexity of today’s circuits and PCBs, this approach will delay the product time to market and will increase the cost.A better solution is to create a single base design and define variations in it by configuring the components and their parameters. The traditional approach would be to design three different PCBs for different hardware requirements and change parametric information to meet the market demand. Together with variations in hardware requirements, this watch should target different markets. Let’s say you are developing a PCB for a smartwatch that comes in three different memory variations 4, 8 and 16 GB. WHY DO YOU NEED TO CONSIDER DESIGN VARIATIONS? Read on to learn about the problems designers face when using design variants and how Altium Designer can help to address those challenges with state-of-the-art functionalities during different design phases. Product variations are managed within a complete product workflow, from schematic design to assembly manufacturing, to synchronize this variation within one complete project. Design variants could include an increased temperature range by substituting components, or replacing or omitting components to meet different market requirements such as a different power supply or smaller display. With the help of powerful variant components management capability in Altium Designer, you can manage product variations so that all versions remain in sync over the product lifetime. By making variations of a baseline product, the new products can address different markets and requirements. Product customization is increasingly popular to satisfy customer demand as both time-to-market and the complexity of products continue upward without abatement.
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