Understanding the hardware production lifecyle
Hello friends and welcome back to my blog! Today, i'd like to switch gears a little bit and talk about the hardware manufacturing process and it's different stages the product is made available to engineering during its development. So if you're working for a product team at a hardware company, this one's for you! :)
The Prototype Phase
This is the phase when the product is conceptualized and designs are being developed by engineering teams. The prototypes will hardly look like the final product and is manufactured in very limited quantities.
They are specifically built to test out new conccepts at the bleeding edge of technology to decide if these designs can proceed to the product development stage.
Product definition
Once the technology is proved in the prototype, teams start developing a product requirements document that encompasses all the functional designs, and answers to all questions engineering has in order to develop the product.
EVT - Engineering Validation Test
Once engineering builds out the product, EVT units are manufactured in small quantities (10s or 100s). This product will not be finished and ready to sell. The purpose of this phase is to make sure that everything is fundamentally working in the product. Especially the electronic components etc. All basic functionality should come to gether at this phase.
Companies might have multiple phases of this to iron out component dependencies amonng other things.
DVT - Design Validation Test
In this phase the product is built in relatively larger quantity. In this phase the product will look much more like a finished product.
During this stage, there are tests like all the mechanical integrations, drop testing etc. that occur. Any electrical or PCB designs should be fixed at this stage.
Platform code that will run on this device will be locked at this stage, and all regulatory compliances that may need to be obtained are done here.
PVT - Production Validation Test
Everything about the design of the product should be locked down at this point and a good sample of products are built at the production factory.
This stage will mostly see fine tuning of mass manufacturing processes and supplly chain issues.
MP - Mass Production
Some companies also call this stage the RTS - Release to Ship.
This is preceeded by production ramp up where the supply chains are populated and customers will start receiving the product. This is the most exciting stage for all the engineers and the product managers!
EOL - End Of Life
This is the final stage of the product lifecycle post which we start all over again with the new product!
And that's it! Now you know what the stages are in a hardware development lifecycle for a product! Note that the concepts should mostly remain the same, but different companies may use different terminologies.
Hope you learned something new! :)