EDACafe Industry Predictions for 2022 – Zuken

Kent McLeroth is President & CEO of Zuken USA, Inc.

As a leading global supplier of electrical and electronic design solutions, Zuken delivers world-class design solutions combining MBSE products and services with a mature, proven electrical and electronic design suite to address the needs of a broad range of industries across the globe. Looking at the year ahead, we see some trends in a few key application areas that will be interesting to track.

Digital Transformation builds momentum, and 2022 will see unprecedented changes in how we engineer our products.

2022 will continue the progression towards a robust digital engineering process. Today, many companies are just now researching what it means to deploy a digital engineering process. The digital engineering process is evolving as new tools, methods, and approaches are required. As adoption continues, drawings and documents will give way to product models that directly drive design and downstream processes, and serve as intelligent building blocks of the Digital Twin. The product model is rigorous, allowing for adjacent engineering disciplines to be coupled more tightly than ever before. The Digital Thread will not only capture design activities and data, but also manufacturing, supply chain, and the end-user via the IoT. Companies that embrace digital engineering will build an insurmountable competitive advantage.

The Design Process Begins With Systems Engineering

Systems Engineering, and in particular, Model-based Systems Engineering, will emerge from its silo at the forefront of the engineering process, and become fully interactive with the rest of the design engineering process. Concept definition, requirements, behaviors, and physical architectures will become readily available to the design engineer, no longer through documents and word-of-mouth, but digitally – within the design data itself. The “gap” between system architecture and the detail design will be closed. New designs will begin with a rigorous product definition, which then drives a model-based design, with performance digitally validated, such that by the time the product reaches the prototype, we can be confident it will perform as originally specified.

Artificial Intelligence Enhances Design Automation

Finally, 2022 will see the release of the world’s first artificially intelligent PCB design tools – allowing engineers to design, validate, and release in a fraction of the time it takes today. Although automatic placement and routing tools have been commercially available since the 1970s, their application has generally been limited to high pin count digital designs. That will all change in 2022 – as tools that learn from humans will provide far more significant assistance to the engineer – automatically producing results indistinguishable from manually created designs. AI will augment and eventually replace the traditional user interface and solve complex EMC problems to boot. Strap in and stay tuned; it’s about to get very interesting! Kent McLeroth is President & CEO of Zuken USA, Inc.

Category: Predictions

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 18th, 2022 at 1:00 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.