Smart products that build-up the Internet of Things are often highly innovative and mandate a short time-to-market. A traditional product development approach applying experience based (conservative) design rules and extensive qualfication tests is obsolete. A smart New Product Introduction methodology is required “to go where no-one has gone before”. A high level of predictive power regarding manufacturability, supply chain readiness, quality and reliability, cost, etc. is demanded from an agile New Product Introduction methodology for Smart Products. Science allows us to predict that what we have never experienced before. The basic elements of such a science-based Predictive NPI approach – technology qualification, quality and reliability physics and virtual prototyping – will be presented as well as its practical implementation.
Geert Willems, imec