R&M~CAE implementation issues in electronics development

Northrop Electronics Division is working to integrate up-front reliability and maintainability (R&M) functions into its computer-aided-engineering (CAE) printed-circuit-board (PCB) development environment. The goal of this effort is to increase overall product quality and decrease overall product cost by decreasing design/development time and promoting optimized tradeoff analysis early in the design cycle. The fundamental barriers to effective integration of R&M~CAE are considered, including: the cultural change that requires some R&M analyses to be performed by the electrical engineer before and during the placement phase; a lack of standard data formats among tools; the inability of some current tools to provide needed data, a lack of automated tradeoff analysis tools; and the unavailability of fast, accurate, and easy-to-use thermal models specifically tailored to PCBs