Half of electronic products ship late, says survey Chris Druce

Some 50 per cent of European electronic products ship late, and 26 per cent of those have known bugs, according to a survey by Enterprise Planning & Research (EPR).

EPR got 231 managers and engineers to complete the survey, at electronics engineering companies across the UK, France, Germany and Scandinavia.

Around three quarters of respondents said that because their project deadlines were usually too tight to permit thorough design verification they were forced either to ship late or to ship with known bugs and 50 per cent said they broke their deadlines in favour of doing more verification. While 26 per cent said they sent out their products, containing bugs, to avoid shipping late.

Only 15 per cent of respondents said that the deadlines they were given for designing electronic products were sufficient to permit thorough design verification. But the survey states that executives cannot shrug off these findings by saying that the bugs that get through are trivial. The survey asked a question specifically about the causes of severe bugs and incomplete system verification was substantially the most commonly cited cause.

Electronics design automation (EDA) software vendor Mentor Graphics contributed questions on verification to the EPR survey.

Karsten Popp, president of Mentor Graphics Europe, said: “Top executives at electronics companies don’t seem to be aware of the risks being taken with their brands by releasing buggy products to market, or of the precise impact of inadequate verification on their margins due to late shipment. With new tools and chip capacities engineers are creating designs that are harder to verify than they are to design. Verification is undoubtedly the most serious bottleneck today – typically it takes 50 to 70 per cent of the design time – and the vast majority of companies are being severely hurt by outdated verification strategies.”

The survey covered a broad range of respondents working on printed circuit boards (PCB), application specific integrated circuits (ASIC), field programmable gate arrays (FPGA), and full custom IC and system-on-chip designs. Half of the respondents were design engineers and most of the remainder engineering management.

http://www.electronicsweekly.co.uk/issue/dailynews.asp#A2#A2

-- Anonymous, June 13, 2001

Answers

This is the problem that hit Nokia and Ericsson
last year.

Nokia sales prompt telecoms slump

Ericsson shares fall despite profit leap

Ericsson Gives Up on Making Mobile Phones

-- Anonymous, June 14, 2001