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All industries are struggling to shorten the profit cycle. No industry is more continually introducing new technologies than the electronics industry, continually reducing engineering budgets, and continually maintaining pressure to continuously reduce costs and reduce time-to-market. This trend is forcing engineers to find ways to reduce product and R&D costs while reducing time to market. A simple solution to this dilemma is "enhance the ability of the hardware design team to work together with other teams related to product design." This approach ensures that the design team works more harmoniously and tracks the state of the design across geographies.
“Improving collaboration†requires engineers to adopt more efficient data management tools, as well as version control. Fundamentally, there are two ways to implement version control: using a temporary version control tool or using a regular version control tool. Regardless of which option an engineer chooses, they will benefit from their R&D process.
Temporary version control
Version control is not a new concept. In fact, if you ask engineers if they are using version control, the answer is almost very positive. However, if you ask more carefully, you will find that the version control they define may be just a temporary solution, including using the Save As feature and then changing the file name to "Version 2."
Using temporary (informal) version control to manage the entire design process can provide engineers with a name modification history; however, it can hardly provide anything else. It does not help engineers understand what is being modified, when it is modified, when it is modified, or even why it was modified from the start.
Moreover, using temporary versioning often leads to other potentially annoying problems, such as:
After the next person in the design process has been sent, the design is modified on the original document without notifying anyone else;
Struggling with each other on each element of a design;
The release date of the product was missed due to data integrity issues.
For engineers who are now struggling to find a balance between meeting customer expectations and improving product development efficiency, it has become a top priority to find an alternative to this temporary form of version control.
Regular version control
Timeliness is a major factor in product development, which directly affects the company's return on investment. Therefore, it is increasingly unacceptable to waste time on the wrong file versions, labyrinth-like folders, and emails. Fortunately, regular version control provides the ideal solution.
By adopting a formal approach, version control is directly integrated into the design interface, extending functionality throughout the design process. This approach allows engineers to implement faster and better designs to reduce profitability, eliminate process deficiencies or duplication, eliminate the need for repetitive work and design, and reduce design, procurement, and production errors.
Profit from regular version control
A prominent example of an electronic design automation (EDA) tool that uses formal version control is AlTIum Designer. This is a set of software for PCB design, FPGA and embedded software design, and related library design and release automation management (Figure 1). The formal version control provided by AlTIum Designer helps us accelerate the development process efficiently. For example, the powerful difference comparison engine in the tool can detect small differences in graphics, parameters, and connectivity between different versions of any design file. In addition, updates to individual files in a project can be achieved with just one command.
Figure 1. AlTIum Designer integrates version control directly into the design interface, reducing PCB development time by 22% while achieving 89% cost target and 90% of released products, while 89% of projects can be budgeted Within the implementation, 90% of the products can be released on time.
With these tools, engineers can fully understand and review any changes made to any element of a design. They can also incorporate any design changes into any version of the project, whether logical or graphical. Moreover, engineers can achieve true version control throughout the design process and naturally implement it directly on their own work desktop.
Using a design tool with powerful, regular version control features like AlTIum Design can bring you many benefits. It allows engineers to understand the true differences between any design data and any two versions, rather than finding a record of version differences on sticky notes or paper. It also provides reliable trace checks so that once the design data is found to be different, the various versions of the design can be synchronized without further manual changes.
Formal version control also ensures good collaborative work, multi-site and on-site collaborative design (Figure 2). Concentrating all design elements into one repository facilitates collaborative work, eliminating the need for engineers to spend time looking up versions and working on the wrong version. Files can be seamlessly shared across any medium, any device, and operating system. All data access and traceability are seamless and absolutely synchronized.
Figure 2. Altium Designer's version control capabilities play a key role in improving teamwork, reducing overall development time.
Formal version control still has a long way to go in eliminating the risks and problems associated with data versioning in the design process. And more and more design teams are also demanding a release data and design data management solution for manufacturers, procurement and logistics, and other departments. In this case, a data vault provides a centralized database solution that optimizes design data, making it an ideal way to manage and track changes in design data.
in conclusion
Version control is a powerful tool for any electronic engineer. The results of the Aberdeen Group's 2011 study are a good example. Research shows that 61% of leading companies (or the top 20% of the industry's leading companies) use version control to manage every data element on the PCB, which is 2.5 times higher than other competitors.
Faced with such data, perhaps the real question now is not whether engineers will adopt version control, but why not give them formal version control. For engineers who want to refocus their efforts on design and try to make a real impact on the market, it's time to take action on the status quo. Choosing regular version control is the first step.
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