Design Perspective

**3**

**Chapter 1**

**Abstract**

part's electrical performance.

**1. Introduction**

improvement, six sigma, product manufacturing figure

Design for Manufacturing of

in the Aerospace Industry

*Ernesto Limiti and Patrick E. Longhi*

Electro-Mechanical Assemblies

Electronic design engineers struggle continuously to obtain a satisfactory trade-off between item performance and cost. On one hand, they would like to employ the best material and components available on the market and opt for time-consuming manufacturing processes in order to obtain high-performance parts. On the other hand, such choice would lead to high recurring cost making the part less attractive in the market. In this scenario, industrial engineering team becomes a crucial industrial entity. It assists the Design Engineers by providing design rules or guidelines. This guidance is intended to provide recommendation to the development team in order to define what is technically feasible and achievable inside an industrial process contest. These rules should not be too strict in order to guarantee acceptable part performance and therefore market attractiveness. The rules contain guidelines on mechanical, process and material aspects. This chapter will focus on design for manufacturing of electro-mechanical parts for the aerospace industry typically being a high-end and high-performance part. Nevertheless, cost and time remain a key aspect to guarantee. The effects of such rules on mechanical and electrical performance will be highlighted and discusses, with a specific focus ion high frequency electrical assemblies (1–30 GHz). It will also contain a review on microelectronic production techniques that impact on the

**Keywords:** design guidelines, design for assembly, design rules, aerospace products, avionics, preferred part list, prototyping, additive manufacturing, continuous

Designing electro-mechanical systems in the aerospace industry is a challenging task for many reasons. First, the programs may last decade, so when the design phase starts the design team must envisage how the product will be sustained and maintained in 20 or 30 years on. Second: reliability is a *must* in this sector. They cannot be taken for granted or worse of all avoided by the design team. Possibly, this is the most important feature a design team should address. All these features are typically summarized in what is defined as quality management system (QMS) that are the company's processes that overlook the design and production phases trying to guarantee the respect of such important requests. All this does not come for free,
