Chapter Seven

Engineering Design

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 Introduction

 Design: is the process of turning ideas into

physical reality.
 Design used to create new product and to build
new devices and systems that meet a human
need.
 The new design might be a radical departure
from anything that already exists, or an
incremental improvement to an existing design.
 Engineering design = = Creative process.

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Design Versus Analysis

 Analytical problems:
1. Called “word Problems”, “Story Problems”,
or “Closed-Ended Problems”.
2. There is only one correct answer.
 Design problems:
1. Called “Open-Ended Problems”
2. There is no unique correct answer.
3. Each solution has its good and bad points.

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The Engineering Design Process

A nine-step design sequence is

introduced it is applicable for both
hardware and software design.
 This process is not linear moving directly
from a start point to an end point.
 The engineer may go back to a previous
step as the design proceeds.

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The Engineering Design Process

1. Decide on needs.
 Having an idea for the new device or
product, to decide on the need of the
customer
 The idea can come from the customer, or and
engineer who has who sees the need for a
new product.
 This step requires a great deal of thinking or
research to determine whether the idea is
feasible, new, and can be sold.
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 The Engineering Design Process
2. Develop product specifications.
 In this step detailed thinking is done to decide
how the device should perform, its cost, how
it will look like, and when it will be finished.
 Specifications and the changes are often
decided on in consultation with the customer.
 Specifications are moving targets, that is you
may end with something different than what
you started with
 Specifications may be altered or tightened to
be competitive in the marketplace.
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The Engineering Design Process

3. Develop a project plan.

 The project plan is the basic road map used by
engineers to efficiently complete a project.
 Planning takes a great deal of time.
 Careful planning makes the design process run
more smoothly and efficiently.
 Engineers need to plan how to attack a
problem in order to ensure that it will be
successfully completed in the least amount of
time.

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The Engineering Design Process

4. Develop a block design.

 The design is performed at a functional
level rather than at detailed level. The
functional block and their interactions
are mapped out.
 Engineers develop several ideas
simultaneously and do not limit
themselves to one design concept.

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The Engineering Design Process
4. Develop a block design (Cont.):
 Developing more than one design has many
advantages:
 An idea from one design will be applicable in
another one.
 Ways to combine two design together to form
a better design may become apparent as work
on several alternatives.
 If one design does not turn out to be feasible,
the backup design will be ready saving a great
deal of time.
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The Engineering Design Process

5. Generate detailed design of each

block.
 Perform detailed designs of each of the
blocks mapped out in the previous step.
 The design is at the component level,
with individual transistors, integrated
circuits, or lines of software being
selected.
 Generate alternatives as well.
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The Engineering Design Process

6. Select the best alternative.

 After generating the design, select the
most promising design among the
alternatives.
 The choice for the alternative should be
based on detailed calculations and
analysis, including simulation
 A prototype of the design is built and
extensively tested.
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The Engineering Design Process

7. Test and verify the design

 Testing is quite extensive and may
include basic test to see if the design
functions as planned and meets the
specifications.
 Test are made to see how long the
design lasts, and how it performs in
extreme conditions.

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The Engineering Design Process

8. Manufacture.
 Work with manufacturing engineers to
ensure that the device is fabricated
properly and works as planned after
manufacturing process, design may be
modified to make it simpler, or less
expensive
9. Deliver the finished product or
device to the customers.

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Team Work

 Most of engineering design projects are

performed by teams of engineers working
together.
 Every member of a team brings a different set
of skills (different technical abilities or
knowledge) to a project, and different
interaction styles and approaches to work with
others.
 Teams without diversity generally do not
function very well

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Team Work
 Some interaction styles:
a) Some are very good on detailed technical
tasks.
b) Some have a good leadership skills.
c) Some are better at working on a piece of
the project individually.
d) Some are good at communicating ideas.
e) Some are better at challenging the
thinking of other team members.
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Team Work
 Every team needs people who are highly
competent, and task oriented, and who strive
high quality.
 Teams also need people who are flexible.
 All teams need good communicators to ensure
that oral and written reports convey the proper
information about the project.
 These qualities will not all appear in only one
individual so the team will include a blend of all
personality types.

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Team Work
 The characteristics of effective teams include:
1. Having a good leadership and clear purpose.
2. They work informally and have open discussions
with an agreement that any disagreement will
be civilized and not personal
3. Everyone participates and everyone listens to
other team members.
4. There are very clear roles and work
assignments for every team member.
5. Effective teams have a blending of different
personal styles.
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Concurrent Engineering

 In most corporations the engineering

design process is performed using a
method called concurrent engineering
 In the Old models of the design process
various tasks were handled sequentially.
 Engineers were grouped according to
specialties (academic disciplines), called
departments in large companies.

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Concurrent Engineering
 The successful completion of the projects
require interaction between engineers of
different departments, this was done at
meetings.
 This process allowed engineers to specialize
and become very good at their area. They could
easily help each other out.
 The disadvantage was that the time required to
complete the design was very long.

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Concurrent Engineering
 In concurrent engineering design is
performed by multidisciplinary teams, all
engineers will work together from the
beginning.
 Design teams often include marketing
experts or purchasing specialists and
sometimes customers.
 This system has been able to reduce the
time required to bring a new product to
market through addressing issues early in
the design cycle.
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Other Design Considerations
1. Safety
 All products meet minimum standards of safety.
 The IEEE code of ethics states that an engineer
is responsible for ensuring the safety of those
who will use his or her design.
 There are many legal requirements and safety
standards that an engineer is required to follow,
these provide a good foundation for producing
safe designs

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Other Design Considerations
 When a design is in a new area engineers
must recognize that nothing is 100% safe,
there are ways that any product can be
misused, and there are unanticipated in a
design it is the engineer’s job is to try to
anticipate and prevent these things.
 Safety can be ensured at the basic steps of the
design, that is when the different alternatives
are being considered, safety should be given
equal weight as all other design considerations.
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Other Design Considerations

2. Environment
 IEEE code of ethics requires engineers to
produce their design in accordance with
sound environmental principles.
 The generation of hazardous wastes during
the production process is minimized.
 When a product expires there are ways to
recycle it or to minimize its negative impact
on the environment during disposal.

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Other Design Considerations
3. Design for Testability
 The specifications for a product often spell out
the test procedure that will be used to verify
that the product works as it is supposed to.
 The design engineer should ensure that the
testing can be performed easily
 Placing easily accessible test areas on the
design makes it easy to troubleshoot the design
or even fix it later.
 Incorporating testability in the original design
makes the whole design process more efficient.
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Other Design Considerations
4. Design for Manufacturability
 It is essential to incorporate manufacturability
into design from the start.
 Anything that is complicated to assemble
requires specialized and expensive workers,
adding cost to the overall design.
 Design engineers must work closely with the
manufacturing specialists to incorporate
manufacturability into the design, this is done
at the stage of considering the alternatives.

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Other Design Considerations
5. Esthetics
 Performing designs that are pleasing to
eye gives more satisfaction.
 Laying out components in a pleasing
manner or helping to design a unique
looking case for a new product.
 Esthetics are not included in the
specifications but it is necessary to
include it as a criteria.
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Engineering Communication
 Engineers who wish to proceed with their
profession must have high-quality communication
skills. Types of engineering communications
include:
1. Engineering Logbooks
 Also called Lab books, are a means for recording all
the work done on a project in a single place.
 Engineers use logbooks to record all calculations
that were made, detail all of the design work,
record test data, record information about
meetings and contacts with suppliers or customers.

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 Engineering Communication
 The engineer is the only one who will see the
logbook, although some companies insist on
keeping logbooks when an engineer leaves the
company.
 Advantages of Logbook:
1. Easier to find information about the project later
on, when details are hard to remember.
2. Better to keep data in a book than on individual
sheets of paper that can be lost or destroyed.
3. Satisfy the legal requirement for defending a
patent, in a dispute about who came up with an
idea first, complete logbooks will aid in
establishing whose work came first

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Engineering Communication
2. Memos:
 Memos tend to be short.
 Memos are used for a variety of purposes
including setting up meetings, soliciting
information from other engineers or
suppliers, briefly communicating the status of
a project.
 It might be written to your manager or
members of your organization.
 Memos are written by individual engineers.

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Engineering Communication
3. Progress Reports
 Engineers provide periodic progress reports to a
customer or the manager.
 These reports detail what has happened during the
reporting period and what work is planned for the next
period.
 This type of reports provide good channels of
communication between the engineer and his customer
or the management.
 It allows for timely reporting of any problems that may
come up.
 Periodic reports may be weekly, monthly, yearly or any
convenient period.
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Engineering Communication
4. Feasibility Studies
 It is much longer than memos and progress
reports
 It is done early in a project.
 Requires a lot of background work and
preliminary design to answer some important
questions about:
a) Whether the contemplated project can be done
b) Whether it makes economic sense to pursue it.
c) Whether it can be done in reasonable time.
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Engineering Communication
5. Proposals
 A detailed document laying out the plans and
costs to complete a project.
 They go out to potential customers or to
higher levels of management within the
company to obtain permission and resources
to start a new project.
 Engineers works with technical writers to
produce high-quality proposals to present the
idea effectively in order to compete with other
proposals.
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Engineering Communication
6. The Engineering Design Report
 This is a detailed report on how the design
was done and how well it worked, it is
submitted after the completion of the project.
 It may be submitted to the customer who
paid to the design or for the management
 It contains information on the problem being
addressed and the background information
that was used in working on the design.
 It also contains information about how the
design was performed, how it was tested,
and the results obtained.
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Engineering Communication
 It may include recommendations for
improvements to the design, which also
makes it valuable to the customer.
 It is important for the engineers who
might do similar projects in the future
to help prevent “reinventing the wheel”.
 In large companies technical writing
experts are responsible for writing
these reports with the help of the
engineers who worked on the project.
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Engineering Communication
7. Technical Manual
 It is called owner’s manual.
 It focuses on how to operate and maintain
the device, while the design report focuses
on how the device was designed.
 It shows the customer how to use the
device properly, and how and when to
perform periodic maintenance, and how to
perform simple troubleshooting and repair.
 It is prepared by technical writers with
significant input from the engineers.
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Engineering Communication
8. Engineering Drawings
 The best way to convey engineering information is
through a drawing.
 Schematic diagram: is a symbolic representation of
electrical components and the way they are
interconnected, and what types of voltages and
waveforms should appear at various places in the
circuit.
 It allows the designer to visualize his thoughts about
the design.
 It also allows engineers to understand a circuit and
technicians to properly build it.
 It is indispensable in repairing a circuit that is not
working correctly.
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Engineering Communication
9. Oral Presentations
 It can be done at a department meeting,
as a talk at a meeting of an engineering
professional society, or to a potential
customer, or higher management.
 Oral reports are fairly formal.
 It is important for an engineer to be able
to communicate effectively orally as well
as in writing.
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 Creativity
 Bringing a design from a concept to finished
product requires new solutions and new ideas.
 Some people are highly creative by nature, but
everyone can learn methods to help enhance
their creativity.
 According to the split-brain theory the
human brain is divided into two halves, called
the left side and the right side.
 The various human activities are housed on
different sides of the brain.
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Creativity
 For example in right-handed people the left
hemisphere tends to concentrate verbal and
symbolic logical reasoning, the right hemisphere
concentrates the spatial and holistic reasoning
processes. The opposite is true for left-handed
people.
 Educational processes are dominated by left-brain
learning, however engineering design requires
right-brain processes especially holistic analysis
and synthesis.
 Attributes of the left side are precision, logic,
linearity, and order. The right side is experimental,
imaginative, creative and risk taking.
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 Creativity
 Some things that can stifle creativity:
1. Habits: Often, we are so set in our ways that we don’t
entertain any creative or new thoughts for very long.
2. Fear of failure: sometimes we are scared we will fail or
our ideas will not work, that we suppress new ideas.
3. Culture blocks: culture of our organization does not
value creativity.
4. Narrow-mindedness: many people think narrowly, and
cannot look at things in new ways.
5. Negativity: Colleagues who feel threatened by new
ideas or who are not themselves capable of creative
thinking, will stifle your new good ideas.

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Creativity
 Steps to opening up creativity include
1. Recognize the stiflers of creativity, once you understand
their nature you can overcome or work around them.
2. Spend some eating & writing with your nondominant
hand, this will stimulate the underused half of your brain.
3. Engage in “information gathering” to get new ideas and to
broaden your thinking.
4. In teams a process called brainstorming is used, where
a team meets for coming up with new ideas. During this
process new ideas are not to be criticized as a bad idea
may stimulate a good one from another team member.
Once the ideas are all laid out the evaluation period
begins.

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 Intellectual property
 Intellectual property: is information that
gives company a competitive advantage
over other companies in some business.
 Intellectual property forms:
1. Information about new designs and
processes.
2. Financial practices of the company.
3. Information about corporation’s
customers and suppliers.
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Intellectual property
Legal means to protect intellectual property:
1. Keep trade secrets within the company. When hired
by a company employees sign an agreement that
guarantees they will not divulge trade secrets to
anyone outside the company.
2. Patent is a grant by the government that gives the
inventor the right to exclude others from making,
using or selling the invention for a given period of
time.
 Patents are public information so competitors can
invent their own variations. Patents are granted to a
person who later assigns his patents to companies.
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Intellectual property
 There are two types of patent:
a) Design patent: covers only the appearance of an
invention not its structure and utility.
b) Utility patent: covers mechanical, chemical, or
electrical inventions and can include devices,
products, and processes.
 Utility patents can be issued for:
a) New and useful processes, machines,
manufactures, compositions of matter, or
biotechnology.
b) New and useful improvements on things that have
already been patented.
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Intellectual property
 What cannot be patented?
a) Devices that have already been invented
by someone else even if they did not
obtain the patent.
b) Devices already for sale or described in
publication more than one year prior to the
filing date of the patent.
c) Methods of doing business, the basic laws
of science.
 Computer software can now be patented.
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Intellectual property

3. Copyrights: exclude others from copying or

using your creative works these include
(books, works of arts, music, photographs,
and notes). This often covers computer
software.
4. Trade mark: is mark, word, or symbol that
is applied to commercial goods.
 Trade marks are unique symbols or product
names that a company wishes to retain for
its own exclusive use. (10 years and can be
renewed)
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