Introducing the Rational Solution for Electronic Design   In working with the semiconductor and custom ASIC industries the design challenges that keep coming up are time to market, complexity, and cost of recall/redesign. These issues have become more acute as the rise of mobile platforms (smart phones, tablets) has increased the demand for the industry to put more functionality into small packages. What makes this even more challenging is the need for hardware and software teams to work closely together to build a complete and coherent... [More]

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  Gone are the days when software developers would wait for the latest release of a chip or board and then determine how to use it; today software frequently drives hardware choices.   This has led to several challenges for companies building smarter products including: Poor collaboration among hardware and software development teams (different tools, terminology) Significant challenges integrating software and hardware, leading to late product launches Increasing amount of software Need to meet regulatory compliance Today, it is critical for... [More]

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Organizations today are increasingly recognizing the benefits of using agile development to allow developers to build products faster. While most large corporations see definite advantages in using the agile approach, organizations are lost when it comes to managing the different metrics across projects. Many organizations continue to use traditional project metrics and struggle to map these to the agile metrics. With agile development becoming mainstream there is an increasing need for an automated metric gathering approach that would relieve... [More]

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The Systems and Technology Group team used IBM Rational ClearQuest software to improve efficiencies and reduce development costs. STG increased systems development processes and program management efficiency, reduced development and warranty costs and increases parts reuse and virtually eliminated abandoned projects. IBM Rational ClearQuest has proven so effective that it is currently being used by 25,000 engineers and programmers at 35 labs in 17 countries. Watch the STG video below or on YouTube: “ Accelerating hardware and software... [More]

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When building safety critical software it is very important to build into the steps of your development process a way to show compliance to the relevant standards. For an industry like medical devices this could mean meeting a standard like IEC 62304 which talks about software traceability through everything you build. In order to have everything lined up for easier approval it is important to have data like FMEA (Fault Mode and Effects Analysis) charts. The issue is how do you fully analyze fault modes with the complexity of cascading faults... [More]

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Electronics fuel innovations in many industries. As a result, electronics firms are under constant pressure to deliver this innovation on time and within budget, while contending with rapidly changing technologies, increasing product complexity and strict compliance and safety standards. Additionally, firms must typically coordinate project tasks across a global marketplace with an international supply chain.   To help meet these difficult challenges, IBM Rational offers a set of solutions and products for several electronics industry segments,... [More]

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I have recently co-authored a developerWorks article with Jordi Manzano of Diagnostic Grifols covering how you can adopt agile approaches within a highly regulated environment.  Although the article is about how agile development practices can be adopted in the medical device field, the approach can be easily adopted by organizations working in other regulated fields. In general, medical device regulations do not enforce a fixed development lifecycle, but development activities are often presented as if they have to be followed... [More]

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  Are you eager to lead the innovation in medical devices, network equipment & semiconductor industries?   We will be hosting the IBM Rational Electronics Symposium in San Jose, on April 18. Paul Brody, IBM Global Industry Leader, Electronics will discuss how we can lead the next wave of software innovation. Whether you build multi-core system-on-chips, carrier-grade network equipment, or life-saving medical devices, come learn how IBM Rational and its partners enable engineering organizations to innovate while increasing agility and... [More]

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I’ve developed a number of medical devices in my career ranging from cardiac pacemakers to integrated anesthesia systems. As many of you know, I’m also a big proponent of agile methods, primarily as a means of improving quality but also as a way of improving engineering efficiency. For most people, finding published information on how to apply agile methods to regulated, safety-critical systems is difficult. I’ve tried to fill this gap with books such as “Real-Time Agility” (... [More]

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I just read a really interesting post by Paul Brody, IBM Global Leader for Electronics Industry, where he discusses how 3D-prininting is more than a manufacturing technology, it is a software-enabled ecosystem.  We are already seeing 3D-printing in production in medical devices like prosthetic and dental implants. This is helping improve living standards, and can perhaps even prolong life. I wonder how performance improvements and new software innovations for such technologies will impact the cost of production and product and application... [More]

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Paridhi: You were recently in Barcelona attending the Mobile World Congress. Can you share some highlights from the event.   Leigh: One of the things that stood out to me at Mobile World Congress 2013 was the large number of new mobile operating systems that were introduced during the event . There was a large and visible Ubuntu Touch booth, easily recognizable with its orange coloring. Nearby was the Mozilla Firefox OS pavilion. And Samsung is now championing Tizen (Linux kernel plus WebKit runtime) and then there is tiny Sailfish which is a... [More]

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Creativity and collaboration help product development teams build better products. Group based games develop creativity and collaboration. This means the right games can help develop better product. This is the basic premise that agile game conferences like agile games 2013   which I attended last week.   During this conference developers there many different :games” played among participants, which were anyone from scrum masters to developers to architects, etc. I attended a session where we collaborated using legos to discuss how a... [More]

Tags:  medical electronics devices industries agile

Paridhi: What challenges do the medical devices companies face today?   Kim: The challenges facing medical devices companies are in many ways the same as those facing all other product development companies. These include increased competition and need to sell into global markets, and the need to reduce development time and time to market. In addition, medical device companies face specific challenges that are not so common. They need to meet strict regulatory regimes that vary between markets and demand proof of compliance. Failure to... [More]

Here are some highlights from the April 18, San Jose, Rational Electronics Symposium event. Paul Brody, IBM Global Industry Leader, Electronics, gave a very fascinating keynote speech . He talked about how we are now living in a software defined world and what it means. Software is managing everything and it's going to get even more pervasive. The software-mentality is invading hardware as well, taking over manufacturing as well with 3D printing and advanced robotics. However, there's only one problem with the software-defined... [More]

The world relies on electronics to achieve real business outcomes and enhance personal lives. Electronics fuel innovation in many other industries and sectors. Whether you build multi-core system-on-chips, carrier-grade network equipment, or life-saving medical devices, come to Innovate 2013 to learn how IBM Rational and its partners enable engineering organizations to innovate while increasing agility and managing complexity. 10 great reasons: 1.    Build sustained innovation through systems engineering and software delivery... [More]

Paridhi: What challenges was STG facing when it started its transformation journey?   Wayne:   The challenges were not unlike the rest of the industry.  Demands for shorter development cycles, focus on deliver to the customer what matters, and high quality. Paridhi: Why did STG decide to go agile and how did they do it? Wayne:   I’ve never been called an agile purist, so while the agile concepts have definitely taken hold and helped STG, we realized it is okay to have a hybrid development process that includes as much... [More]

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Agile success stories are commonplace in the IT domain, but little has been published about agility for embedded, product line systems and Telecommunications industry. In his new article, Harry Koehnemann, Director of Technology, 321 Gang delves into the details of one embedded product organization’s adoption of IBM® Rational Team Concert™ to support their agile engineering practices. He explains how their hardware, software, and project management teams collaborate, their use of agile techniques, and their migration to Rational... [More]

Join the May 29, 2013 Webcast: Diagnostic Grifols: Being Agile While Still Being Compliant Wed, 29 May 2013 Time: 1:00 PM EDT / 10:00 AM PT / 17:00 UTC/GMT  Duration: 60 Mins Register Today! Although Medical Device regulations do not enforce a fixed life cycle model, activities are presented in a sequential manner hinting at a waterfall process. Meanwhile, for a decade or more, software teams have benefitted from Agile development methods. There’s a number of Medical Device manufacturers that have adopted Agile practices while... [More]

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  Test Virtualization is critical to allow CSPs, communication service providers like AT&T, Verizon, Orange, etc collaborate with the network equipment manufacturers. Without this virtualization it is tough for these groups to understand the complete network topology in a specific customer situation without having to bring up an entire network just for testing purposes. This is very costly, time consuming and many times impossible given the fact that tests are occurring before some hardware is even available.   Fundamentally... [More]