When it comes to printed circuit board (PCB) design, mistakes can be costly—both in terms of time and money. A small oversight can lead to expensive rework or even require reordering the board entirely, setting your project back in time and budget.
To ensure your product launches smoothly and on schedule, consider a thorough design review by an experienced outside party like ours.
Let’s explore the key benefits of incorporating a PCB design review into your process.
1. Faster Time to Market
In all engineering domains–whether electrical, software, or mechanical–the later in a project a problem is found, the more expensive it is to correct. Errors in PCB design are no different.
Every delay in the design phase can cascade through your entire development schedule. Errors found later in the process can result in costly repairs or rework. Worse, they might force you to reorder the PCB, delaying your timeline by weeks.
An objective PCB review can keep your project on track by identifying mistakes early, catching issues before they become bottlenecks and helping your entire product development cycle move faster.
These design reviews can also prevent software engineering delays. If software teams are waiting on hardware to begin their testing and validation, any PCB issues can significantly delay a project’s timeline. A clean PCB design from the start ensures that software teams have what they need when they need it.
2. Improve Product Quality
In software development, fewer bugs mean higher quality. The same principle applies to PCB design. Hardware, just like software, can have bugs—and these bugs can impact the performance, reliability, and functionality of your product.
A design review improves product quality by uncovering potential flaws before production, helping you avoid problems down the road and ensuring your product meets customer expectations.
3. Lower Product Costs
Electrical hardware designs are often under tight schedules, leaving engineers little time to search for the most cost-effective components.
Analyzing your design for cost savings is a great way to lower product costs from the start. At Daedalus, our electrical engineering team can identify opportunities for cost reduction without compromising on quality or performance.
A design review can also help free up your engineers. Your internal electrical engineers can focus on hitting milestones while external teams like ours work in parallel to reduce your bill of materials (BOM) costs.
At Daedalus, our review process doesn’t just identify technical flaws—it can also uncover hidden savings.
4. The Value of an Outside, Objective Review
What are your team’s expectations for a design review?
If you’ve asked your team what they think constitutes a successful PCB design review and they say “one that shows the design doesn’t have any problems”, then you’ll know that your PCB designers have a profound misunderstanding of what a review is and what makes it successful. Unfortunately, this is a misunderstanding that will cost their company money.
Why bring in an external team for a design review when you already have experienced engineers in-house? It all comes down to perspective.
Design vs. review psychology
Design is a creative, optimistic activity—your engineers are focused on building something new. Review, on the other hand, is a critical, skeptical activity that focuses on finding potential issues. It is difficult for a design engineer to step back and view their own work with a skeptical attitude that assumes there will be bugs in the design somewhere.
Fresh eyes catch more. An internal designer might see a successful review as one that finds no problems. But an effective review often uncovers issues that the original team missed. And at the end of the day, a review that doesn’t find problems… is a failure.
External teams offer broad experience
Our engineers bring diverse backgrounds and experiences, offering insights that may not occur to those deeply involved in the design.
The goal of any review is to find and address problems early, preventing them from escalating into costly issues later. It’s difficult–if not impossible–to conduct these design reviews with your own internal team, due to your (well-intentioned) bias and lens.
Benefit from a Fresh Perspective of your PCB Design
With an objective design review from an experienced electrical engineering team like ours, you can accelerate your time to market, improve product quality, and lower costs. At Daedalus, our fresh perspective ensures that every PCB design is scrutinized thoroughly, giving you the peace of mind that your product is built right the first time.
Don’t let small mistakes lead to big delays, missed cost savings, or design improvements. Partner with Daedalus to ensure a smooth, successful launch.