As the manufacturing industry are stepping forward the Industry 4.0, smart factory and flexible manufacturing, DFM or design for manufacturing has won great popularity. The whole industry is talking about DFM, but what is DFM and how does it works?

DFM or Design for manufacturability, is not only to fulfill the requirements of product’s function, appearance and reliability, but, more importantly, to take the manufacturability of product into account since the beginning of product design, thus making a high-quality product at lower cost and shorter time.

Let’s elaborate on this graphically. In conventional product development mode, product design always comes first, next is process design, finally the design enters into manufacturing. The process seems to be completed here, but the problems remain far from over. During manufacturing, issues such as design omissions, assembly difficulties, etc. show up, then these issues are sent to R&D end to fix the design and the above process shall be repeated until the final product meet the requirement. In such mode, product design and manufacturing come apart, more like Sequential Engineering as shown in the picture below.

As we can seen, the conventional mode costs much labor, time and material, virtually reducing the competitiveness of product.

An ideal product development mode should be as concurrent engineering, in which DFM occurs early in design stage, and defects would be identified and addressed at the beginning, greatly avoiding waste of cost.

 
Why is DFM important?

Take PCB design as an example, when designing the product, R&D engineer would consider the process capability of production line to ensure the designed product could be produced successfully. However, R&D engineers are not familiar with the manufacturing procedure of factory, therefore a lot of design defects are not identified until mass production.

PCB design that excludes manufacturability would bring difficulties to process and assembly, causing lots of soldering or assembling defects and increasing re-spins. While the introduction of DFM software has made things different.

With DFM software, design and manufacturing are no longer two separate processes, but interact with each other. DFM/DFA analysis could be conducted in PCB design stage to make the design fit the process technology, thus reducing reworking times and shortening the NPI cycle.

Based on industry needs, Vayo Technology strongly recommends VayoPro-DFM Expert software for an advanced 3D DFM/DFA analysis. Stay tuned as we get more details on DFM solutions.

This is a demo video of DFM software.