DFM Expert to Facilitate the Development of Avionics

Aviation industry has made significant progress along with the continuous development of science & technology. As an essential part of aircraft technology, electronic technology has gone through significant revolution as well and will face more challenges against the development approaches of modularization, integration and miniaturization.

At present, the manufacturing of avionics has the following features:

1.High value, high cost, technology-intensive

The cost of avionics product has accounted for around 40% of the cost of whole set, and for those aviation platforms such as electronic warfare airplane, Airborne Warning and Control System, the cost of electronic equipment has accounted for almost 50%. For large passenger aircraft, airborne equipment has occupied more than 30% of the total cost. Up to now, avionics have become the part of highest value of aircraft.

The current process design and simulation technique of airborne electronic equipment seriously affect the whole procedure including development, trial-production, testing, manufacturing and maintenance, etc. of the product. It has been an urgent need to promote the process design capability so as to ensure the fast and high-quality delivery. Therefore, DFM should occur in the early design and process review stage so as to respond to the challenges of high-quality and on-time delivery of airborne equipment.

2.Advanced in design tools and production facilities while weak in process capability

The design & fabrication departments of avionics has taken the lead in the design tool and production facility, while lags behind in the process capability. Process engineers tend to get caught up in a good deal of word processing and tedious calculation work, having little time to dig into the process technology, which is not beneficial to improve the process technology as well as production capability.

3.Hard to retain and pass on the experience

To produce an avionics product, it is actually a process to collaborate the design, processing, fabrication and testing, etc. At the present, the industry is faced with the shortage of skilled technicians, and young technicians shall need a transitional period to accumulate the experience. By traditional method, when those elder technicians retired, it’s hard for managers to retain their empirical knowledge.

Under such circumstance, depending only on the traditional techniques cannot cope with the challenges ahead, and a professional software tool becomes necessary for electronics enterprises. DFM Expert software was developed on this background. With more than ten years’ efforts, DFM Expert software has been an advanced solution to help client stay ahead in high quality and high efficiency. As an unique 3D DFM/DFA solution, DFM Expert software is able to analysis and check the manufacturability of PCB design by 3D assembly simulation early in the design process, well before the fabrication begins, thus to reduce the prototyping times and improve overall production efficiency; as an intelligent software equipped with thousands of design check rules, it could not only make up for inadequate experience of technicians, but also shorten days of manufacturability analysis to hours, greatly reducing the time and human cost. What’s more, the built-in thousands of design check rules, which are based on IPC standards and industry experience, a lot of potential defects could be identified in design stage, thus facilitating the reliability of final product.

As the winner of Innovation Award from IPC, DFM Expert software has also won extensive recognition of customers worldwide.

“Vayo tool has been extremely useful for us in identifying assembly issues much ahead of the actual assembly process. This has drastically reduced holdups in the production line, increasing our productivity.” said Atar Mittal, General manager from Sierra Circuits.

“We are impressed by the high level 3D DFM/DFA capability. It does a great job identifying assembly issues that can easily be captured in 3D DFA/DFM reports. Customer feedback with this unique 3D DFX/DFM capability has been overwhelmingly positive.” said Mukesh Vasani, CEO from Aimtron Corporation.