Legacy drivers
If you look back over the history of the printed circuit engineering industry, cost was really a driver for most businesses. Meaning, what they were looking for from a supply chain perspective was to reduce costs. And that worked well — when the supply chain was relatively stable, you could see cost as being a function of which supplier you chose or which distributor you chose based on the design that you’d already created. However, what we’ve seen over the last couple of years is some dramatic instability in the supply chain. It’s really gotten to the point where the supply chain is brittle and unstable. The only insight that we’ve got into the supply chain today is that this instability is going to continue.
One of the ways customers are trying to handle this is changing the way development teams hand their Bill of Materials (BoM) over to component engineering at certain points. Conducting analysis on whether components are obsolete, what their AVL looks like, and then having that information come back to engineering just doesn’t work anymore in this age of supply chain instability. We see customers saying, “Hey, what was in the supply chain yesterday, it’s just not there today.”
Creating a closed-loop component management system
When we think about optimization as a pillar and how that applies to supply chain resilience, what we’re really talking about is creating a closed-loop component management system, so that we’re no longer operating in silos between engineering, between NPI, and between purchasing or procurement. It means creating a tightly coupled process within the OEM, so that we can really understand the trade-offs between risk and cost in the supply chain at every point from the design right through to the manufacturing.
One of the biggest problems to overcome is the siloed approach. If you look at supply chain information, it’s often contained in an ERP or MRP system, and not completely shared with engineering in a timely way. Often supply chain information gets updated on a quarterly basis. What’s unfortunate in those instances is that when you have separate systems staff, you’re often passing Excel spreadsheets between systems rather than having them truly connected.
Any time you have a manual process, you’ve got the potential for errors. It raises questions like:
- Are you using the right set of data?
- Is the data current (real-time)?
Trusted supply chain
Trusted supply chain is starting to become a key topic as well in regard to supply chain data. Specifically, trust of a single component. We have done a lot of work on creating a digital twin of the component. There is a standard called the JEP30—it’s part of the JEDEC standard, ratified in 2018—that functions as a complete digital model of the components. Now instead of having a model be something like a datasheet and then some files that fly around with that, we’ve got the ability to create this digital view of a component that then we can sign to assure its authenticity.
It’s similar to how we looked at domain names in the past. How do you know that Nex geneering owns a domain name? Well, it’s because you have an authority that provides a certificate that signs it. So, what we’re looking at today is how we can ensure that all the information about a component that a component manufacturer publishes is trusted. And in a very similar way, trusting it through having a certificate that allows you to establish its authenticity.
Today, it’s almost antiquated to think that all you do is put up a datasheet, and that describes a component, and you don’t really know if all that is authentic or not. It extends beyond that when you start looking at the relationship into the supply chain. If we look at the flow you get a component from a component manufacturer that then goes to a distributor; from the distributor, it goes to an EMS. At every point along that supply chain, at some point, we want to be able to ascertain trust and traceability.
Eventually, we want to be able to get to the point where we can understand where all the threats are in the supply chain, and what the risk of those threats are.
What does it mean for board assembly?
On one level you want to make sure that your components are trustworthy and have visibility into things like ‘country of origin’ information. Then you want to get all that information to shift left so that you’ve got a very high degree of confidence that you can build a reliable product.
Then you want to be able to look at a digital part model that’s trusted, truly know the authenticity of it, and extend that trust into your product. You can then say this PCB is trusted.
The value in knowing where components are used
There is immense value in knowing what components are used within your portfolio of products. If you do identify counterfeit components, now you’ve got visibility into the supply chain to understand where that threat may have arisen. And now that you’ve identified this component, you can manage recall situations that are hugely expensive. If you can really target a recall down to a specific module or sub-module, that’s of absolutely tremendous value.
How to verify components
Nex geneering EDA is investing a lot in the component digital thread. We’re trying to create the idea of a very, very accurate digital thread from the component to the OEM, down through the entire component ecosystem so that you can track that right down into manufacturing and product. We’re right at the start of this transformation. Today, there are hundreds of millions of data sheets just flying around, so this is going to be a huge transformation for the electronics industry. And when we get there, we’re really going to see this fuel a new level of productivity and security for the industry.