Sounds like innovation
UK manufacturer of high performance audio and visual equipment, Linn Products, is renowned for its stylish, luxury products. Through using Altium Designer the company has been able to reduce PCB design-time by half, enabling it to bring its high-quality products to market more quickly.
“Our designers spend less time inputting data and more time being creative, which is key to the development of our innovative products.”
- Ian Wilson, Electronic Design Team Leader, Linn Products
The Background
Scottish-based Linn Products, has been delivering high-quality music and home cinema systems for the last 35 years. Its precision-engineered, hand-built audio and visual equipment can be found throughout the world in luxury homes, royal residences and on board the world’s finest super-yachts.
The company has one of the largest product design teams in the UK, employing more than 30 engineers, nine of which are electronics engineers, committed to developing systems that reproduce sound as faithfully as possible to the original recording. They focus on producing systems capable of delivering the full emotion of a live performance in the home.
The project
The company’s continued success is reliant on the design and delivery of leading-edge luxury products. Linn Products has a platform strategy approach to developing its business where it reviews key areas of technology that will take the company forward. As part of this activity, the company was looking to upgrade its existing PCB CAD system, which had become cumbersome, with a modern PCB development tool that would allow its engineers to take a design from concept to completion within a single application.
Each new product takes anything from three to six months to design. PCB design was typically three to six weeks development and the majority of this time was spent simply inputting data onto the CAD software. “Previously designers had to draw each schematic from scratch,” says Ian Wilson, Electronic Design team leader, Linn Products. “The design would then be passed on to other parts of the company and suppliers for component procurement, project costing and manufacture.”
The challenge
The challenge for the company was to find a modern PCB design tool and development package that would enable it to design the PCB electronics in a shorter time period. This would allow it to deliver its high-quality products to market faster, to meet customer demand for the latest and best products, and without compromising on performance.
As well as reducing lead times, Linn Products was looking for a package that would integrate easily with its existing database with little disruption to existing practices. And the software would need to be easy to use by the designers.
The solution
Linn Products chose Altium Designer after a thorough evaluation of the marketplace. “We looked at a number of competitive packages and decided on the Altium Designer as the best because of its functionality,” says Wilson. “We were impressed that Altium could deliver such an array of capabilities for the price. The result was not just a replacement to our existing system but a new platform upon which we could build new methodologies.”
The company has received great support from Premier EDA Solutions and designers have attended Premier EDA Solutions’ training courses. “We have been taught shortcuts and tools that enable us to make the process even easier and quicker,” continues Wilson. “It is reassuring to know that support is always a phone call away.”
The results
Results in the first year have been impressive. Through using the Altium Designer package Linn Products has been able to reduce PCB design time by half, which leads to overall reduction in the product development cycle.
The Snippets feature of the software enables designers to re-use the layout and copy parts of the design, without having to start from scratch each time. Board routing takes half the amount of time that it used to, and the whole product development process is much faster. Wilson explains: “This also means that the designers spend less time inputting data and more time being creative, which is key to the development of our innovative products.”
It also allows for more consistent design, which has enabled a more efficient process. In the past, designs would vary from engineer to engineer because a PCB schematic was started from scratch every time. Now Linn Products’ designers are able to share board designs more easily, and drawings can be copied in a few simple steps.
The software was very easy to set up and run and has integrated well with Linn Product’s existing business systems – their Oracle-based business database and their Solidworks 3D CAD system. Designs can be shared more easily between the PCB design and mechanical teams which reduces risk of error. The software enables the electrical teams to produce a 3D render of their design automatically, so the mechanical teams are able to view a virtual, finished PCB and know exactly where to place connectors. These files can be imported directly into the mechanical design package (SolidWorks).
Altium Designer has also improved Linn Products’ customer supply relationships. The company is now able to share board designs with one of its suppliers of silicon more easily, as they also use Altium Designer Software. This enables them to check designs against stock and library models at an earlier stage, which speeds up the development process.
The Altium Designer package is a multi-functional design tool - PCB layout, schematic, simulation and bill-of-materials (BoM) data are all seamlessly integrated into a user-friendly tool, under the direct control of the design engineer. The Altium package automatically creates an accurate BoM from the product library alongside the board layout “This is a quicker and more efficient process, which helps us keep track of design costs, and we can be more accurate with our project costs,” says Wilson.
Altium Designer played an important role in the development of the company’s flagship digital audio system, Klimax DS. The stylish and sleek Klimax DS is the first authentic hi-fi product to stream digital music over a standard home network, setting the benchmark as the highest performance digital music player in the world. The platform approach adopted by Linn, has enabled the design team to produce the sister products to the Klimax DS - the Akurate DS and Sneaky Music DS with integrated amplifiers - all within a very short project cycle time.
References
Visit Linn Products' website