Design Review
Prerequisites:
- Requirements specification
- Logical design (Schematics)
- Physical design (PCB Layout)
- Mechanical design (3D Models)
Tools:
- Printouts & PDFs (Offline)
- Collaborative design tools (Online)
- Bug-tracking software
Next Step:
The verification process starts with a simple peer design review (the software world calls their parallel a code review).
For simple designs, this could take a matter of hours; for more complex designs, it could be a multi-week process, with lots of little revisions in between reviews. At some point, the whole team should get involved and do a comprehensive walkthrough of the design, preferably in the most asynchronous way possible.
The focus of the review is to optimize the prototype for maximum debuggability. You should assume that this first prototype will have issues, and you need to build in as many safety nets as you can. Your ultimate goal of the first pass-through verification is to learn everything you need to build a second prototype that requires no additional fixes.
The secondary priorities are everything from design style, to schematic clarity, to manufacturability, to testability. Everyone has their own little quirks and preferences and a design review is a great forum for aligning your team around a common style.
Expect to do a couple of reviews and make fixes in between them, including more and more stakeholders as you find fewer and fewer errors in the design. This will be a period of high volatility in the design, but hopefully with lots of mostly small changes. You will need to exchange the design with a lot of people not accustomed to spending their time in design tools and the more collaborative your tools, the quicker you’ll be able to iterate through this phase.
Once the design gets a thumbs up from the team it moves on to component selection, BOM review, and alternate management.
See also: Design Review in Upverter