Redesign Driven by Manufacturing Data for Next-Generation Modernization of Legacy Products

As the life cycles of many products advance, obsolescence of original components can pose challenges for a product's maintainability and serviceability. Information about the original design intent of the product system may not be available. For example, it may not be obvious how to identify old components by reverse engineering or to select and configure the optimal components for best system performance. Thus, time spent to redesign an older legacy prod-uct with high-fidelity simulations may be difficult to justify. Increasingly more performance measurements are available in digital twins of product systems generated during manufactur-ing and testing. This paper introduces a redesign from manufacturing data mapping (RfMDM) method that can infer optimal new components to modernize legacy product systems. This RfMDM method does not rely upon time-consuming redesign efforts. The inputs come from a basic understanding of the subsystem of concern and qualitative scoring estimates of the influence of design rules on design criteria and simulation fidelity. RfMDM transforms manu-facturing data to determine the significance and required quality of each design variable of each obsolete component. This enables estimation of optimal new component specifications for selection and a first article redesign and test to enable product line improvements over time more efficiently. Recognizing that radiofrequency interference effects in printed circuit boards present a complex and quintessential example of legacy subsystems with potentially obsolete components, this paper demonstrates the RfMDM method with a theoretical example subsys-tem of an active low-pass filter on a printed circuit board.