Products - Page: 7 of 9

Our approach to design analysis is based on practical, meat-and-potatoes methods derived from more than twenty years experience in helping customers build products that work. One of the more helpful tools we've developed and used is probability- based risk assessment, a component of our Worst Case Analysis Plus™ (WCA+) design validation methodology.

WCA+ is very powerful, but there's a catch...it requires thinking. We happen to believe that thinking is a good thing, even a prerequisite for proper engineering. However, many of you may have noticed that a lot of our peers spend their time pecking at computer terminals running simulations. Although this can be helpful in some cases, this is not engineering. Analysis is engineering, and analysis by definition requires thinking, not tinkering.

We discovered a long time ago that simulation tools were of very limited value when applied to analysis. This heresy was kept internal to our company, where we developed our own math-based software to help us analyze rather than simulate. The result was that as time went by and our math skills improved, we found ourselves using simulations a very small percent of the time; most of the time we sat and thought and analyzed, resulting in a very good understanding of the designs we were developing or evaluating for our customers.

Granted, employing math analysis was a heck of a lot more work than fiddling with component values in a simulation, but the professional payoff for this discipline was immense, both in meeting our customers' needs and in job satisfaction.

The bottom line: our customers were very pleased. We identified problems that had been missed by testing and simulations, problems that could have cost a bundle to fix downstream, problems that could have severely damaged profit margins, problems that could have resulted in fatal blows to our customers' reputations. From a personal satisfaction standpoint, it just felt good to know what was happening in a design, and to be able to help our customers in a very cost-effective manner.

INTRODUCING DESIGN MASTER

As we developed our skills, we also developed our in-house software. After several years and many refinements, we made Design Master commercially available. Since we had to actually use the program on a continuing basis, we made it as easy to use as possible, while constantly refining and adding features. The result?

With Design Master, you can answer the following critical questions:

·Will this design meet its specifications for the worst case combination of component tolerances and operating conditions?

·If not, what is its probability of failure?

·If not, what components or operating parameters have the greatest effect on performance, and how should I adjust them to correct or center the design?

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