[acheron9383]

When you design electronics you have to produce millions of, it takes a couple of dev 'spins' and usually a couple of prod 'spins' to get to the mass market board. Usually the PMs, EEs, MEs and SWEs get together and spec out a schematic, then the EEs will create the first draft of the board. There is usually extra connectors and test points on this board to ease testing and development. Once they verify it powers on, I as an embedded software engineer, start producing the software to get it running, or 'brought up'. While that is happening EE testing is going on for all sorts of things like EMI, power, communication speeds, etc. Besides the software I actually write, the chipset vendor's drivers need to be added and tested as well, there are always little things that take longer than they should. I've lost a lot of schedule to very subtle issues with chips. As we progress along, the schematic or layout gets updated and new versions are produced. Maybe the traces need to change to reduce EMI, maybe a chipset isn't workign well or we find a cheaper equivalent and swap it out. Then once everything looks good we move to a production version, all the test points are removed, and we start putting in orders for the parts we need in volume. If you want a million of something you usually have to order in advance. Then you start bringing the factory online, helping with factory test software...and well the point is the cycle time for all this is like 6 months for a tight ship. More like a year if the kind of thing your making is novel to the team since you need a longer dev time.