<title>New methodology of work with concurrent engineering in electronic design</title>

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper aims at proposing a new enhanced way of working in electronic design. In fact, the design of an electroniccomponent requires many competencies and skills, and the joint effort of several researchers and engineers, not necessarilylocated at the same place. With traditional ways of work and communication tools, the interactivity level is reduced and itseems that the product life cycle cannot be improved significantly anymore. As a response, the technological progress inhigh speed networks and new communication and interaction tools open the way to concurrent engineering. This paper thenaims at presenting such way of working, the new functionalities provided to users, and of course the benefits they can gain.As a case study, an actual example in the domain of electronics design illustrates this paper.Keywords: Concurrent engineering, Cooperative work in electronic CAD, Collaboration tools, Communication networks 1. INTRODUCTION What is the product that can, nowadays, be designed, developed, made and sold by a single person? In fact, in every activitydomain, for every product or service to provide is the result of the work of a complete team that are often geographicallydistributed worldwide.This is the case, for instance, in the domains of aeronautical design, and automotive industry. Today, to solve the problem ofthe multi-disciplinarity skills required, automotive and aeronautical manufacturers create platforms composed by all thepeople involved on the project, belonging to all the involved manufacturers and suppliers, in a single place. Of course theseplatforms induce all the problems of buildings, confidentiality, and travels of people. This statement has been the source of alot of efforts in of concurrent engineering in many economical domains, and lead to the deployment of many intra andextranets. Thus, first work deals with asynchronous tele-engineering (in deferred time), based on electronic mail, filetransfers, etc.But, following that way, synchronous cooperative working is now possible thanks to new information and communicationtechnologies (networks services, computers, multimedia devices, communication and cooperation software, etc.). This newway of working will allow creating virtual platforms or virtual enterprises. It is then expected to improve competitiveness ofenterprises in allowing engineers and technicians to increase and improve the number and quality of their interactions. Then,it should be possible to improve the QCD factor (Quality I