Consumer electronics product design is a dynamic field that blends creativity, functionality, and user-centric innovation. Consumer electronics product design aims to create devices that seamlessly integrate into users’ lives while delivering intuitive and enjoyable experiences. Design and Development of Consumer Electronics Product Designs has come a long way from traditional product development. Earlier, product development involved a semiconductor company building a reference design around a brought out silicon/processor and promoting it in the targeted market segment. Some examples include semiconductor companies like Texas Instruments and Analog Devices, who are building reference designs around their flagship processors for a variety of Lifestyle Electronics and Consumer Electronics Product Development like cell phones and automotive infotainment applications.

The Traditional Method

Reference Designs or evaluation platforms have certain eco-systems in place for SoC, power management, memory and other key components. The software provided by the silicon vendor would ensure basic functionality of the reference design. Based on these reference designs, OEMs would build a form factor prototype catering to their specific consumer electronics product vision. The OEM would then invest heavily on both Hardware and Software engineering resources to customize the hardware to fit the form factor of the Consumer Electronics Product Design and Development they envisioned. They would then negotiate with vendors and tweak certain components to bring out the final product to market.

Consumer Electronics Product Design

Consumer Electronics are all types of electrical devices, digital or old-school analog, that are intended for everyday use. They are usually small devices, can be mobile, stationary or wearable. Today, we have seen a radical change in the process of designing. Most fabless semi-conductor companies and ODMs operate in the heavily commoditized consumer electronics market space. Except for some big companies like Apple and Samsung, most OEMs are involved in only defining the specifications and functionality of products. The new age fabless semiconductor companies that dominate the consumer electronics or lifestyle electronics market today do not just stop at creating a reference design, but are also involved in the Consumer electronics product design which are nearly 80-90% completed.  

Not only do they define the components that go into the product, they also bring together the entire eco-system of component makers required to for a Consumer Electronics product development. They negotiate and control the entire BOM of the product. Working with ODMs, they provide a product that can move into production at an accelerated time frame thereby removing the need for OEMs to have a large engineering team. So what does the OEM do? They define the product, differentiate it based on applications, UI, UX, industrial design, software features and spruce up the look and feel of the product as the core of the system is technically taken care of by the silicon vendor/ODM.

Role of ODMs in Consumer Electronics Product Development

• An ODM today is not just a design house, but is a “brain house” with the ability to envisage the entire product and bridge gaps between silicon vendors and OEMs. ODMs today need to have the ability to provide a ready-to-deploy Consumer Electronics product development and work with an EMS (Electronic Manufacturing Services) to provide a boxed product to the OEM.
• An ODM needs to continuously innovate and come up with consumer electronics product design and consumer electronics product development which can be converted to an end product with minimal time and effort thereby significantly shortening the design cycle, helping the OEM to introduce products to market at an accelerated rate.
• The base designs should have the flexibility to scale to different variants of the products while retaining the core functionality without compromising on the key features and still meet accelerated time-to-market schedules and quality.

This change in trend has brought about a revolution in both Consumer Electronics product development and design space where major brands especially in the emerging markets concentrate on brand building, distribution and marketing while leveraging the engineering strength of the silicon vendor and ODM. Their focus on in-house engineering is reduced drastically. This has resulted in significant cost savings which has been passed onto the customers in terms of a wide range of economical consumer electronics product development like phones, tablets and life style products which compete with brands like Apple and Samsung.

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*Published in EE Times India