The Electronics Manufacturing Process: From Requirements to Production
Electronics manufacturing turns a product concept into a repeatable physical product, but the process involves far more than assembling components onto a printed circuit board. Before production begins, teams define electrical requirements, select and validate components, create the board layout, and connect the hardware design with firmware, testing, sourcing, and production controls. Each decision needs […]
What Is Requirements Gathering? A Guide for Hardware Engineering Teams
Requirements gathering gives your hardware team a shared definition of what it is trying to accomplish before expensive decisions become difficult to reverse. This definition covers more than solely customer-facing features. It also needs to account for physical constraints, performance, component availability, manufacturing, safety, compliance, serviceability, cost, and the interfaces between mechanical, electrical, and software […]
PCB Design for Manufacturability: A Practical DFM Checklist for Electronics Engineers
PCB design for manufacturability helps engineers find problems that could make a board difficult, costly, or impossible to fabricate and assemble at scale. It checks the design against a fabricator’s capabilities and a contract manufacturer’s assembly processes, and the requirements of the released product configuration. Engineers can resolve these problems before they delay a prototype […]
What is the Product Life Cycle?
Key takeaways A hardware product’s life cycle spans five core stages: ideation, design and development, manufacturing and launch, service and support, and retirement. These stages are interconnected rather than strictly linear. Manufacturing issues, field failures, supply-chain disruptions, and component obsolescence can all send a product back through design and change processes. Product lifecycle management (PLM) […]
We Vibe Coded a PLM. Here’s Why You Shouldn’t.
Key takeaways AI can produce a convincing PLM prototype surprisingly quickly. Building the first version is only a small part of the actual cost. Scale, integrations, security, and data integrity turn an internal tool into an ongoing software operation. Building an internal PLM means accepting responsibility for an entire software product. Hardware companies should focus […]
Engineering Change Orders (ECOs): What are They, Challenges, and Tips
An engineering change order (ECO) is central to how hardware companies manage changes to established product designs. Market events, customer feedback, field issues, and new competitors can all require teams to adapt products. The potential impact of product issues can be significant: across five U.S. industries, companies recorded 3,295 recalls, while the number of defective […]
Open by Design: Why Duro Will Remain CAD-Agnostic After Joining Altium
Key takeaways Duro will continue to operate as a standalone PLM platform. Duro will remain CAD-agnostic and continue supporting integrations across the hardware technology ecosystem. Altium supports this strategy and has never directed Duro to limit an integration with any vendor—including a competitor. Customers will continue to have the freedom to build the hardware technology […]
PLM for Electrical Engineering: Connecting PCB Design, Component Data, and Manufacturing
Before a PCB can move from design to production, electrical engineers are typically tasked with a slew of work: select and qualify components, manage alternates, release an accurate electronic bill of materials (eBOM), prepare fabrication and assembly files, document revisions, and communicate changes to everyone from mechanical engineering to procurement and manufacturing. The design of […]
10 Best Product Data Management Software in 2026
Engineering teams waste an average of 23% of their time on non-value-added work, including searching for scattered product files, chasing down design feedback, and navigating disjointed approval loops. For mechanical and electrical engineers alike, that means time lost tracking down CAD and ECAD files, checking revisions, and making sure the right data reaches production. Product […]
API-First PLM: How Circuitly Connected AI-Powered PCB Design to Duro in a Day
Key takeaways Circuitly built a working Duro integration in roughly 18 hours, including component publishing, library mapping, design-file attachments, and change order creation. The important result was not speed alone. The integration let an AI-driven design workflow move quickly while Duro preserved review, approval, revision control, and traceability. Duro’s API-first architecture gives customers and partners […]