Siemens' Thomas Yip on how software speeds circuit design.
This episode of Designing the Future is brought to you by Siemens Capital Electra X.
Circuit development for electronic devices has never been easy. The schematic is key, and the path from ideation to an understandable, buildable circuit is essential for project success. Today, there are multiple software tools that free the circuit designer from the traditional constraints of conventional circuit layout, opening the door to faster iteration, and better, more reliable devices.
Joining engineering.com’s Jim Anderton to discuss how high technology can free circuit designers to innovate faster and at a lower cost is Thomas Yip, Software Development Director, Integrated Electrical Systems, Siemens.
Learn more about the speed, convenience and efficiency of Capital Electra X. And, sign up for a 30-day free trial.
* * *
Episode transcript:
Jim Anderton
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Designing the Future. Circuit development for electrical and electronic devices has always focused on the schematic. Circuits are generally complex, but a well-developed block diagram in schematic makes current and signal flow accessible and understandable and facilitates further circuit development as well as service. Now as part of an intelligent engineering development program, the process of ideation to manufacturing should not only facilitate understanding of device operation, but act as a launching pad for design iteration and both educate and inform the engineering design team. Now today there are sophisticated tools that take the grunt work out of circuit ladder and design and can help bridge the gap between concept and production release. Joining me to explain how design engineers and circuit designers can leverage these technologies is Thomas Yip, he’s Software Development Director, Integrated Electrical Systems at Siemens.. Tom, welcome to the show.
Thomas Yip
Thank you Jim. Thank you for having me here.
James Anderton
Tom, this is a fascinating subject. Now, when I began this industry over 30 years ago, layout, circuit layout was done on the back of a beer coaster or a napkin or a scratch pad and it was transferred to a paper schematic, which was then formalized with decals, with Letraset, and we would literally use a metal stylus and emboss these things in and it created a very rigid kind of a workflow or a system where making changes in the fly was quite difficult, quite expensive, and created a large sort of paper trail. How do these modern systems that we have today compare in terms of efficiency compared to the way that we used to do circuit design?
Thomas Yip
Well, this is what you’ll call that there’s a huge difference nowadays, mainly because the industry is driven by more and more complexity, more and more necessity for collaboration. Teams are spread all over the world, most of them remotely. Right. So there is a need to have these things done collaboratively with good workflow, version tracking and so forth. So that is a huge difference nowadays. The demand for such tools, especially in the last couple of years, has really accelerated.
James Anderton
Now we historically, there used to be a development process where we’d have an idea and then perhaps a block diagram and the block drive, we’d tend to compartmentalize or modularize the design and perhaps you might have a radio frequency expert on your staff or someone who’s the power supply man or woman, and of course you would then sort of sublet the design to those people, then integrate it later at this point. How is that design methodology? We live in a world now where your radio frequency expert might be a continent away or halfway around the world. How does that change the way that we design circuits these days?
Thomas Yip
Well, this is very common. In engineering, we tend to break down a big problem into smaller compartmentalized problems. Right. So with regular tools it is going to be a bit more difficult because it seems to be everyone has their own PC and their own software installed on their own PC. So in terms of collaboration and in terms of sharing it’s going to be a bit more difficult. But right now we have these cloud native tools, right, which essentially makes all these collaboration superbly easy. We also have real time collaborative diagramming. That means at the same time, Jim, you can work on your part of the circuit and I can work on my part of the circuit.
So these kind of tools are based on the cloud. They are built with the cloud in mind, enhanced with every layer of security in there to ensure that third parties don’t get access to the circuit that you and I are working on. So right now, especially so in Siemens, we are really pushing this sort of collaborative software and cloud-native software out there so that the users get to benefit from all this software without the need to set up their own IT team, their own servers and so forth.
James Anderton
Tom, there used to be an old expression that too many cooks spoil the broth and with collaboration, of course, we have the ability now to bring a very large number of people into the design process at this point, and historically with traditional systems, it’s been very difficult to corral and control the revision process to make sure that we didn’t go through the alphabet and have many, many dozens of different revisions before we lock the program down. It sounds like you’re talking about a way to sort of create some order from that chaos.
Thomas Yip
Yes, absolutely. Especially for us, we have the ability to say limit customers to view permissions, right, and comment the permissions. So certain people can comment but not work on the diagram. And even for people who can work on the diagram, there is a list of version history. We know exactly who has changes at what time, whether in the middle of the night or in the morning. Right. And we have the ability to be able to compare each different versions, compare yesterday’s version with today’s version, and if we didn’t like it, we have the ability to roll back and every single one of these things is tracked and can be rolled back in a huge jump or can be rolled back in a step-by-step. So these are automatically built into all this software.
James Anderton
Now I come from a manufacturing mass production world where designing consumer products in particular and consumer product design has some interesting complications. It could be as simple as, for example, a purchasing manager approaching the engineering department and saying, I need to change the source for a power semiconductor, which is functionally the same part but from a different vendor, which means it has to have a different part number. So a different part number has to be reflected in the bill of materials, in the documentation all the way backwards and forwards. So now we suddenly have a different schematic, we have a different bill of materials, we have a different part, essentially all of which has to still functionally operate in a production environment. How can systems like you’re talking about here help sort of smooth over that change? Because that used to create chaos, those sorts of changes.
Thomas Yip
Well, right now the issue at hand is that it used to be if you and I need to share these sort of drawings, I need to have these sort of drawings in multiple places, right, we used to do it by sending emails and then renaming it to V1 and V10 and V20 or this final version. Right. Because of the nature of the software that is built at the current moment, right, it sort of lives on the cloud and hence you can be on the plane and you can ask me to update something. The moment you land and we open your laptop, you can have the latest version. You can be assured that is the latest version.
So this save us a lot of time and a lot of problems in terms of disseminating all these things. We could have, the production shop floor have a view permission and I could be anywhere in the world edit that drawing. And the next morning if there’s a production run and when they open that drawing, it’s going to be updated, confirm. Right. So this sort of collaborative cloud software bring a lot of this sort of automatic syncing, right, that is extremely beneficial to the customers.
James Anderton
Yes. Tom, historically in my experience, there’s been a little bit of natural and actually beneficial tension between the production engineering staff of course, and the pure design element. It’d be quite common where the physical constraints imposed by the system, heat sinks, the physical size of components for example, I’ve seen circumstances where the substitution of a cheaper ceramic capacitor for an expensive tantalum capacitor meant a physical problem with printed circuit design, that kind of thing. It sounds like we’re talking about a way in which we can perhaps get the design engineers to work more closely with the manufacturing engineers.
Thomas Yip
Yes, absolutely. We have done a ton of studies and we find that lately not only that the project complexity has increased, a lot of companies are facing time to market problems. That means it used to be, for example, you may be able to design a new car in three years. Right. Right now that is not competitive anymore. You need a new car probably every two years or even every year.
So the amount of people that is needed to collaborate on all these things, including the production flaw and all these things is going to be increased by multiple fold, and hence there need to be a way for all these people to be able to edit and communicate. The reason a project is successful or failed relies heavily on whether the stakeholders is able to collaborate and communicate. Right. So we are extremely happy that the platform or the architecture, especially for our Capital Electra X, has all this collaboration, and syncing, and communication built in that will easily allow all these parties to be able to say, the shop floor make a command, okay, this capacitor is causing me a lot of problem, and that guy somewhere over a remote or in HQ can look at a command and can make changes and be rest assured that those changes are propagated to the shop floor again, really easily.
James Anderton
Tom, there is an increasing transaction in all manufacturing to push some of the design responsibilities out to the vendors. So we see sort of a decentralization of design responsibility and in some ways that makes obvious sense. If you have a semiconductor supplier for example, they will have expertise in their product, and so we’re at a point now where it used to be we would ask for a spec sheet and we’d get the specifications, and then we would turn around and we would then keep the entire design in-house. Occasionally you might telephone perhaps an engineer at the vendor there who might give some advice. Now it’s going a bit beyond that. We’re actually asking them to come into the design to a certain extent and say, show us how to use your product or your component in here. Is that going to change do you think, the way we do it? Is that the kind of thing this software can be used for?
Thomas Yip
Yes, absolutely. The way we do it is that everything is based on teams. You can look at it as a team or as a project. We have folders. In fact, everything, folders and files that you can share with anybody you like. So for example, if you’re working on a project, you can say this project is to be shared on a couple of vendors and a couple of customers. Right. And you can bring the expertise in and for them to help you and look at your circuit design and vet the circuit design or even suggest components that can be used in that. So traditionally this is going to be really difficult because you’re really worried about security and you don’t really want your file to go out and be passed around without control.
But with such a system, all you need is a browser and a secure sign in. And as you know full well, cloud-based applications, right, there’s a huge focus on security. So the onus is on the manufacturer of the software to put in all the security layers to ensure that this guy who signed in is really who he is and not some third party. Right. So you can be rest assured that you’re sharing to the right people, people who you really want to have that customized permission.
James Anderton
Tom, I’m glad you brought up the issue of security because we also live in a world now of iter of absolute restrictions on some things which are not just military, but an increasingly broad category of dual use because they’re dual use products in particular. I have met, for example, on the radio frequency side, some RF experts working in say millimeter wave microwaves where they’re not permitted to even publish their thesis from university because they’ve been classified. So we live in a sort of world where you need to get your product out there and sell it and collaborate globally, but at the same time, you’ve got to assure that if a customer or a military or a government agency approaches you, you can demonstrate that you have the security in place. Is that demonstrable level of security, is that the kind of thing built into these packages now?
Thomas Yip
Absolutely. Siemens takes all these things extremely seriously. We have in place many, many protocols and we go through a lot of vetting including ISO standards to ensure all these security layers and all these software are compliant, right, on multiple levels in terms of data privacy, in terms of security, in terms of sharing, even internally within Siemens itself, we have in place processes and so forth to ensure that data stay in a particular geographical location. So Siemens takes all these security extremely seriously, export control and so forth.
James Anderton
The common concern especially many SMEs have about advanced software packages always is that their engineering resources, which are expert at designing circuits, need to design circuits and not become experts in operating software. The difficulty of taking complex software where it’s a useful tool, but it also absorbs time and expertise to learn how to use the tool. Is simplicity of use, how much is that a factor in the implementation of these packages?
Thomas Yip
It is extremely, extremely, extremely high. I was in Silicon Valley and I met the guy, Barry Katz who invented the Apple mouse from IDEO. Right. So the fact of the matter is that right now with the proliferation of hand phones and so forth, our attention span on our screen has increased so much. So the way I look at this problem is that, right, if we require the user to spend time going to classes or reading a tech manual book to learn how to software, then we would have failed. I’m very sure the many new applications that goes to your phone or goes to your laptop nowadays do not require that anymore.
So unfortunately, in terms of computer aid design software because of legacy problems, that’s still a little bit of a steep curve to get what they call that up to par, but especially so for Capital Electra X. When we first developed the software, one of the main criteria is that we want people to be able to use it without needing to read a book or go through any classes, hence everything is very intuitive web standards, drag and drop kind of thing. So we have made this one of the most important point because we understand as electrical engineers ourselves, that we really don’t have time to learn software. Right. We are needed to design a circuit and we are needed at a production site to commission the machines and all these things. Electrical engineers are really busy people, hence the focus on ease of use part of the software.
James Anderton
Now, traditionally, of course, many of these packages originally were derived from mechanical engineering software. So I always find it quite ironic that someone whose perhaps designing a motherboard for a personal computer is using similar software to someone who’s designing a bridge. So as this software specializes and deviates from that, will the things that the young engineer learns using basic simple general purpose design software, will that knowledge translate to this new realm?
Thomas Yip
Well, slightly. What we try to do is to ensure a good user experience. Right. And if the user have experience with CAD software, then that stand them in good state. Right. But we look at it this way, right, we want to focus on something where we have domain expertise and Siemens has a ton of domain expertise, especially so in terms of electronics, in terms of electrical, and of course also on the mechanical CAD part. Siemens has a complete portfolio of all this software. On our side, we are so much focused on the electrical part of the solution, therefore we want to be able to help the engineer, right, do the stuff that is important to them. That is we want to have the software automatically do a lot of the nitty-gritty details, but allow them yet to focus on safety and great design.
Now, there is design also need to be cost-effective. Right. So you need to focus on innovative design, cost-effectiveness and safety, right, rather than the nitty-gritty details. As you mentioned earlier, you need to make sure all these buildup materials, the numbers, the components and all these things must be correct. Right. So the software tries to help you in all these things so you can focus on the design. That’s what we are trying to do.
James Anderton
Tom, in the last few decades, a new generation of designers emerged who were what we used to call cowboy designers. They’d use this dead bug prototyping technique, for example, and they would build things and blow them up, build things and then say, we’ll put a trap in here to take out that erroneous signal. We’ll clamp the voltage here, and they would just sort of throw components at designs and then iterate their way and just run the schematic on a continuous basis to sort of get the outcome they wanted.
This is the opposite, of course, the original way that the traditional formerly trained designers would do it, which is based in mathematics and physics where they would carefully think their way forward in a block wise fashion from the front end of the circuit to the back end of the circuit to try and get to the finished schematic in as few steps as possible. Now, the current sort of thinking is that if you can get there by iterating multiple times, but do it quickly, it’s cheaper and better. Does software like yours, is this the kind of thing that’s going to basically allow that quote, unquote cowboy or that fast thinking young designer to just basically try things faster?
Thomas Yip
Absolutely. At Siemens, we’re working really hard, especially so in the areas of AI and generative AI. And the fact that the software can allow you to modify all these circuits and all these diagrams relatively quickly. We don’t allow problems because there’s always the possibility of rolling back to your original design if something doesn’t work out. So hence, this sort of software plays a huge role in the user’s ability to be able to shorten their design time, right, to be able to iterate all these things really quickly and get their product to the market.
James Anderton
What about the “what if” scenario? In most engineering meetings I’ve met, there are all sorts of speculative questions like “what if”. What if we reduce the size of that inductor? What if we switch to a switching power supply, what would the consequences be? This sounds like a way in which you can sort of experiment in a much cheaper way than sort of building and blowing things up.
Thomas Yip
Absolutely, absolutely. In Siemens, there is this, what we call that, huge effort collaboratively with many big players in the industry in terms of building digital twins. Right. You would absolutely want to do these things digitally without a lot of costs. Right. While at this current moment, some of the models that is in the CAD drawing are actually accurate in terms of physics. They are just not a model, but they conform to what they call that, physical performance. Right. Okay. So that you can change something and you can understand and can see almost immediately whether those things affect your performance.
James Anderton
It’s a fascinating subject. We could talk about this for hours. You mentioned AI, of course, and naturally it has to come up because it is such a popular subject right now. It’s evolving so rapidly. And we’ve talked about the ability to simulate our way to success virtually using digital twins rather than having to go through the old awkward process of prototyping and bench testing at this point. Is AI going to replace the conventional human circuit designer in the future? Can you see a future basically when software like yours, for example, becomes itself a universal designer essentially, and a non-expert simply asks for a new circuit and gets one?
Thomas Yip
I think that’s possible, but I think at the current moment, I don’t believe it will replace the human designer. Right. I think the human has a lot of ability to put things together. You can ask the software to generate one part of the circuit for you, absolutely, but in terms of understanding the bigger picture and so forth, sometimes it is extremely difficult to articulate. So we have customers who design small machines, but we also have customers who design an entire factory. So there’s a lot of moving parts everywhere from the front of the conveyor to the machines to the interaction and all these things. I think it is possible that AI will generate some circuits for you, but I think you still need a designer to sort of put them together and ensure they work well together.
James Anderton
A brilliant future. Thomas Yip, CEO Siemens Capital Electra X. Thanks for joining me on the program.
Thomas Yip
Thank you, Jim. Pleasure.
James Anderton
And thank you for watching. See you next time on Designing the Future.
* * *
Learn more about the speed, convenience and efficiency of Capital Electra X. And, sign up for a 30-day free trial.
