I would like to share some statistics about hardware development. The results can be applied to your projects too.
Picture: Time needed for my latest Hardware development project (in percentage)
Facts from the project
- Schematic design (95h)
– 72h drawing the schematic
– 23h schematic checking - PCB design (215h)
– 15h placement
– 50h connecting nets (excluding DDR3)
– 95h DDR3 design (routing (35h), length matching (50h), checking(10h))
– 20h Improving layout
– 35h Assembly drawings, stackup, 3D modeling, … - The work around components – ordering information, availability, footprints, … (50h)
All the information was taken from my work summary sheet. The work summary document is generated from ProjectAndTask.com which I use to track down my time.
What’s your experience? Do you agree with these numbers? Leave a comment.
Welldone Blog 
Very interesting Robert, seems we have both done very simuilar jobs recently, the only difference was that I could not import the original design, I had to totally re-create it. Your total time of 360 hours is very close to my mark. Seems experienced designs dont work too much differently!
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Thank you John for your feedback. Yeah, certain number of hours need to be done to finish a new design. And often it is not 10, 50 or 100 hours … as many people may think 🙂
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Perhaps your “schematic design” should be changed to “schematic capture.” This posting suggests that “time needed for Schematic design” is 26% of hardware development time, and for PCB design is 60% – schematic design takes 2.5 times less time than PCB layout. When you write “schematic design,” do you mean schematic capture? Circuit design, simulation, verification, discreet carrier noise analysis, loop stability optimization, thermal analysis, micro-strip, strip line, parasitic extraction and verification over temperature and power, and especially creating models for all of the components can takes order of magnitude more time than this 26%.
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Mike, by saying Schematic design I mean Drawing schematic + Checking schematic + Thinking about the schematic. I agree, Circuit design or Board design is much wider term.
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