Month: August 2010

Integration of mobile technologies is becoming easier and faster every year. However, new problems arise and old problems occur again when devices are industrialized and tested in field. For instance, integrating a positioning sensor based on GPS/Glonass into a small device requires careful study of many aspects at the same time, such as:

1. Environments: indoor/car/street/open air.
2. Antenna: directivity pattern, band stability, noise rejection (in all use cases!).
3. Electronics: noise parameters, thermal stability, clocking accuracy.
4. Requirements: responsiveness, accuracy, energy consumption (in all environments!).

Although each separate component is working as expected, after their integration into a commercial product, the total system performance can easily fall outside specified product requirements and user expectations. Proper systems engineering skills such as making the most efficient product partitioning, knowing what matters most during integration and understanding how to test the most important use-cases is even more crucial.

To make a successful product, each problem area needs to be understood in detail so that its design assumptions are quantifiable and the complete system design can be optimized well. Quflow helps small business/lean projects with the systems analysis, integration and industrialization needed to make the most successful mobile devices and new technologies.