Virtual is Real With Electronic Systems Prototyping.

• Author: Carlson, Steve
• Position: Viewpoint

"Time to market" is the key metric for every commercial product development effort. Unless your product is truly "crazy great," being second to market is never good. Commercial product developers leverage leading-edge tools and technologies to try to win the race to get their product to market the fastest.

When faced with reducing product development time, the Defense Department and defense industrial base revive tactics from the past "Total Quality Management" initiative. This initiative focuses on efficiencies in current processes. Each step within these processes is thoroughly examined. Self-defined "non-value added" efforts are eliminated, usually replaced with self-defined "better" efforts. The new and improved process is then implemented, during which self-defined success criteria are created and, oddly enough, met.

This technique has proven to be quite ineffective. The process improvements are, at best, marginal and are never permanent. The reason for this failure is simple: the problem is not the process steps--the problem is the process. And the biggest contributor to schedule delays and costs overruns to the defense product development process is the overdependence on prototypes of the actual system, creating a "build--test--repair" flow.

When one takes time to ponder the paradox of system prototyping, the schedule delay and cost overrun contributions of this single step become obvious and ominous.

Consider this: Developing the prototype system takes time and costs money. Because the design is dependent on the results of the prototype testing, all major design work stops. It should be no surprise that the costs of the prototype system are generally quite high.

Developing and executing the test plan for the prototypes requires a separate and large engineering staff and test facilities. This large group must work hand in hand with the design team to develop the test plan and ensure that their test instrumentation does not affect the performance of the subject system.

Assessment of the testing results and determining the impact of the design takes time. Designs are "locked" following the appropriate series of testing and results interpretation. But because of the current long defense industry and department design cycles, the moment the designs are locked they immediately have diminishing manufacturing source issues.

Because prototype testing is performed individually first on all subsystems, then major subsystems, then finally as an...