原创 The process of mobile phone design and manufacture -- I

The process of mobile phone design and manufacture --I

Author: Steven Jiang (Shenzhen Kenah Technology Co., Ltd.)

 Time: 2009-5-17   Transshipment Forbidden

Today, I try to introduce the mobile phone design process and department relation in the design house. And then talk about the test before the mobile phone on the market.

First, mobile phone design process

Generally speaking, the design house has six departments, the six departments as follow:

ID、MD、HW、SW、PM、Sourcing、QA。

1, ID (Industry Design) Industrial Design
Including the appearance of mobile phones, material quality, hand-feeling, color match, the realization of the main interface and the design of color and so on.

For example, Motorola "Ming" translucent clamshell, the Nokia 7610's circular-shaped appearance, Sony Ericsson W550’s orange color, Nokia 5800’s touch function and the Motorola R1 revolving-slide function. The user’s experience and special feelings belong to the mobile phone industrial design. The industrial design of mobile phone is particularly important, because the success or best-selling of mobile phone depends on the Industry Design.

2, MD (Mechanical Design) structural design

MD refers to the housing (face A and back B), the camera position and the fixed way, the connecting between the battery and the mainboard, the thickness of mobile phone, If it is a slide phone, how to slide up and how to achieve auto-up shells, and the arrangement of how to plug in and take off the SIM card. All of these are the areas of Mechanical design of mobile phones.

It is necessary to know the Material and the craft to the mobile phone designer.

The thickness (just 13.90mm) of the Motorola V3 leads the fashionable trend. The sales point is the Ultra-thin. The housing of V3 uses the advanced aero metal. It can be said that the success of the V3 depend on the choice of the special shell material.

Speaking the important of the MD, someone said he can fell the housing shaking when the Ultra-thin slide phone calling or answering. The bug come from the MD design, because the housing is very thin, the housing and speaker make out the resonance.

And the Motorola R1 and Nokia 5800 are the represents of the successful combination character ID and special MD.

3. Hardware designs include the circuit design and antenna design. And it is important that HW and MD should keep communication.

MD required the phone has a thin shell, so the first thing is that design a thin circuit. Meanwhile HW required the MD leave a big black space for the antenna, and there is an enough distance between the antenna and the battery. In addition, HW required the ID do not place the metal parts close the antenna and so on. It is obvious that the cost of a mobile phone which has an internal antenna is higher than the external antenna mobile phone. The main factors is the antenna design, the material required, design of the circuit and the cost of the production, all of the terms lead to the higher cost than the external antenna mobile phone.

Usually, the MD design engineer and the ID design engineer have an argument. MD said ID is just a painter, to paint something which can’t make out. And ID said MD is clumsy, the MD can’t understand the thought of ID department, can’t design out the suitable MD to coordinate with the ID design. So the mobile phone is not popular and has no the good sales.

On this account, it is necessary that all of the department will gather together to analyze and judge the feasibility of the ID department thought. A good ID plan has a creative, has feasibility on MD, and the most important is that the consumer accept the ID, Nokia 8800 and Motorola V3 are the samples.

In additional, sometimes, there is an argument between the HW and ID, for example, ID like the metal Ornamental on the housing.  But the metal parts will affect the antenna design and lead to the static problem to endanger the security of the main-board. The metal parts lead to the more difficult to avoid the signal shield and the static problem. So it needs to develop the new material to meet the ID requirements. The Nokia 8800 is a good example, a sense of the metals, without affecting the antenna’s reception.

4. SW (Software) Software Design

Relatively speaking, SW is more easily understand by everyone, due to the popularity of the computer, so that we can maximize the various kinds of software. For example cell phone user interface model---the mobile phone nine operating menu. This scope belong the SW design.

SW work is to design the interface, and test the operability of the interface. SW test is very complex, and there are numerous items. SW test is not just in the search for Bug, consistency tests and compatibility tests are very important items. in the current "content-based" information age, software is the final behind-the-scenes mainstay for a mobile phone. The driver of hardware was performed by the software. So there are many conflicts between the SW and HW not less than the other departments. On this account, they need a PM (Project Management) to coordinate and management. Next we talk about he PM.