Purposeful engineering: A balance of technology and market interests

I attend as many engineering conferences as my schedule and budget allow. The presentations keep me up to date with new technologies, products, and applications. The breaks between sessions afford me the opportunity to meet with many engineers from around the world. It’s during these less formal discussions that I often learn what engineers are looking for in new components, tools, and technical information.

I rarely hear from leaders within the engineering community during either the formal sessions or informal discussions, however, on the broad macro-economic forces or market shifts that affect our industry and, by extension, engineering work. To the contrary, typical comments voice conventional local concerns often cast within the hierarchy of device, circuit, subsystem, and system. Complementing that product-focused hierarchy is one, just as important, that focuses on market structures, dependencies, and influences that are every bit as important to the purposeful and successful practice of engineering. Yet our tacit focus appears all too often limited to essentially incremental changes to product definitions, designs, and implementations: cheaper, smaller, and more feature-rich. These incremental goals, of course, have nothing to do with the economic or market forces that affect our industry’s many sectors; they are simply consequences of technological evolution’s organic rate of advancement.BEYOND THE ORGANIC RATE

Superimposed on that rate of advancement are the effects of market economies and technological innovations that create opportunities for some companies and close market windows on others. Consider, as just one example, the rapid adoption-rate growth of permanent-magnet motors during the last four years, during which the costs of raw materials such as iron and copper more than doubled (Figure 1). For a given mechanical output, permanent-magnet motors are smaller and lighter than traditional hysteresis-motors and use less of those increasingly expensive materials.

Historically more expensive than hysteresis motors, now many sizes of permanent-magnet motors are in fact less expensive and, with modern controllers, more energy efficient and capable of broad speed ranges. Although the control techniques have been, in many cases, in the literature for decades, the economics of both the motors and the applications in which they operate have only in the last several years made it attractive for power IC manufacturers to integrate the control functions.

The result has been a dramatic shift in the competitive environment for products as diverse as household appliances, HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning) equipment, industrial drives, and power hand tools.

Examples of these machines among household appliances include high-end clothes washers and air conditioners. Appliance manufacturers have equipped their top-of-the-line clothes washers with direct-drive permanent-magnet motors that provide very high drum spin speeds (>1,000rpm), which extract more moisture than slower competing machines. This feature, which saves users time and costly energy during drying, is one of the few that bring a price premium to a product category that otherwise offers few opportunities for product differentiation.

The value of this design approach, however, isn’t contained simply in the feature description. The permanent-magnet motor and its control electronics allow for a significant simplification of the machine’s mechanical design, eliminating the transmission, pulleys, and the drive belt, reducing the machine’s weight, allowing for larger drum volume for a given case size, reducing assembly costs, and increasing the machine’s overall robustness.

Air conditioning units with variable-speed motor drives operate their coolant compressors and fans more efficiently than do units with constant-speed drives. Here again, the combination of permanent-magnet motors and their control subsystems benefit manufacturers by reducing the machine’s cost and weight. Those advantages extend to the end user as well, who also benefits from the machine’s quiet operation and low energy costs.

TRENDS TOWARD INCREASING MARKET IMPEDANCE

A broader trend has potentially deeper consequences for the electronics industry though, judging from most trade publications, it has garnered little notice. Recent years have brought significant growth to the industrialized economies of Asia, North America, and Europe despite continuing deep cyclical trends in many sectors and significant increases in energy and other key commodity costs (Figure 2).

Key to this period’s economic performance in all three regions has been the contribution of consumer spending. Unfortunately, strong indications exist that suggest coming weakness in the consumer sector. At the same time the expectation for consumer spending is approaching zero growth, some high-end consumer goods are just reaching their most profitable portion of their product cycles. Maturation of technologies and manufacturing processes coupled with rising unit sales combine to bring economies of scale that accelerate sales into a receptive market.

For example, large-screen televisions have significantly benefited from the maturation of LCD- and plasma-display manufacturing processes. As the cost of large screens fall and as their viewing characteristics improve with wider viewing angles, better image contrast, and lower surface reflections, they have become both more attractive and more affordable to a larger population than were similar models just a few years ago.

Top-end models within manufacturers’ product lines garner the greatest margins. Although recent improvements in their retail prices have brought these products within the range of budgetary consideration for a growing number of households, the fiscal uncertainties that those households face could impede their near-term sales growth.

What does all of this talk about economic conditions and market behaviors have to do with anything that design, component, product, or manufacturing engineers control? Engineering disciplines determine a product’s balance of features, performance, and cost. When a given product has achieved sufficient performance and features to satisfy the market, however, automatically striving to provide additional features may not be in either the manufacturer’s or the customers’ best interests. In this context, an engineering discipline informed by both technical and market hierarchies provides the greatest probability of success.MIXED PERCEPTIONS

During the 2007 ISSCC (International Solid State Circuits Conference) in San Francisco, a panel lead by Stanford University Professor Thomas Lee at one point inadvertently illustrated the contrary practice, in which the general perspective of the engineering community can significantly diverge from the interests of customers. The panel comprised a professor from the University of California, Los Angeles, and technology leaders from Infineon, Intel, Texas Instruments, Hitachi, and Silicon Laboratories. Its focus was the broad topic of so-called digital radio transceivers.

During the course of a lively session, one panelist asserted that, because of the ongoing progress of process shrinks past the 90nm node and onto the 65nm and 45nm nodes, RFICs for mobile handsets would soon feature as many as 20 radios. According to the panel, the need of IC manufacturers to make efficient use of expensive silicon area on those advanced processes is driving this dramatic architectural shift. I asked if the panel knew anybody who wanted 20 radios in their mobile handset. Was this RF capability simply a way of filling active area on a chip or could they identify some specific customer value that those radios offer? None could nor could anyone in the audience. Rather than the extra functions that those radios would supposedly provide, I suggested that I and most other handset users would likely rather have mobile phones that more reliably maintain their connections. By coincidence, the next day’s newspaper reported on a survey of mobile handset users that echoed my suggestion: Users don’t want more features they want greater reliability.

In similar fashion, during the early days of Bluetooth-radio chipsets, when a $25 BOM cost for a Bluetooth implementation was yet unattainable, a certain European manufacturer among the first with commercial parts met with me to discuss the applications for their technology. After presenting the best-known application, in which tens of dollars worth of silicon replaces the piece of wire connecting a mobile phone with its headset, they suggested that soon every refrigerator made would be equipped with a Bluetooth radio so that the refrigerator could download shopping needs to the householder’s PDA.

I asked if they could introduce me to anyone who wanted this capability in a refrigerator and, if so, how much were they willing to commit to pay for it. After some discussion, it became apparent that they had yet to discover such a person but that the base-cost of a refrigerator appeared large enough to hide the additional cost of the Bluetooth radio and other necessary technologies not then in evidence. Suffice to say that, in the years since, Bluetooth has become a far more affordable technology then it was in those earliest days and it has similarly found its market niches in which they value it offers customers is commensurate with its cost. To the best of my knowledge, chatty refrigerators are still not one of these niches and the company that had proposed this application is no longer in the semiconductor business.

I’ve still not met anyone who wants messages from their refrigerator nor have I met anyone who wants 20 radios in their wireless handset. Nearly everyone I ask, however, is highly in favor of features that represent real value and high on that list, though significantly underreported, is greater reliability.

About the author

Joshua Israelsohn is a co-founder of JAS Technical Media where he manages the company’s technical-communication consultancy practice. He holds an SBEE from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and has more than 15 years electronics design experience.

Click here for Illustrations:

Figure 1, Figure 2