Lifecycle Challenges in Long Life and Regulated Industry Products

With the rapid commoditization of electronics, its content in the products are going up and this has resulted in shorter lifecycle of the systems and components. As the performance per dollar increases, speed of obsolescence of components is quicker. Most of the industries are adjusting to this rapid change to stay in business even though this puts lots of strain on their business. Changes can be replacement for obsolete parts, compaction, aesthetic changes etc. While this may be fine with industries like Consumer, Automotive etc. there are class of products and industries (also known as domains) which have a different set of requirements. Products in the Avionics and Medical domain not only have a very long life but also very tightly regulated by the bodies like Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and Food and Drug Administration (FDA). This puts additional challenge of getting the product approved and certified whenever changes are made. This paper looks at the different challenges that product with long lifecycle encounter and how some of those issues are addressed. In many cases, impact of a small change can be very profound and unless a well designed process is in place. Otherwise addressing the life cycle challenges can be tricky. Added to this is the unique development processes used in Medical Devices and Avionics Devices development. In both these cases the uniqueness comes into effect due to the safety and reliability requirements of the products as they deal with patients and passengers. This paper deals with two types of challenges: (1) First one are the issues that designers need to address when they are designing the system so that they don’t have issues later due to long life (Preventive), (2) Challenges that need to addressed when product has lifecycle issues (Reactive).