Design For Availability

Often, the choice of the components used on a printed circuit board (PCB) is driven by a combination of several factors, including, feature requirements, performance expectations, and cost considerations.

While all these are no doubt important, it is also vital to ensure that ‘availability’ is given sufficient consideration in the selection process.

This is an important element where supply chain and engineering have to collaborate by jointly establishing a well laid out availability risk assessment and mitigation methodology.

"A product with higher share of generic components is far more immune to supply disruptions as against one using more niche/specialized components"

Improve Supply Chain Flexibility

As the first step, we would have to ensure multiple sources for every component used in the product. This can be done in a few different ways. For instance, there are several standard components which are manufactured by multiple suppliers with identical specifications.

A product design which uses more of such parts and qualifies multiple alternate parts in the BOM is always more immune to one supplier running out of stock, discontinuing the part, or being forced to stop productions.

Product designers, therefore, should be encouraged to use more of such parts, aiming to achieve Form Fit Functional equivalents.

However, it is always quite possible that we may not find a perfect form fit functional equivalent for every component used in the product.

The Next Alternate

When form fit functional equivalents are not a possibility, the next step would be to proactively look for parts which can still meet the functional requirements of the product and make the design compatible, robust and agile enough to accept such alternatives.

For instance, one may find another chip with similar functionalities, but the footprint (pin mapping or the peripheral components) required around this chip on the board may be different.

Identifying such cases at the design stage would provide an opportunity to design robust yet flexible PCBs that can support integration with parts from multiple and diverse sources.

Such dual foot-print designs can prove to be of immense value in managing supply chain disruptions.