DFE of Electronic Products - An Interdisciplinary Approach and First Results

DFE - when it comes to high tech products in one of the fastest growing markets, such as communication electronics, this term today incorporates requirements from all phases of a product life cycle. Thus, the designer meets an interdisciplinary challenge with environmentally sound material processing, manufacturing, refurbishing, recycling, disposal and logistics to be considered. An considerable basic and applied research work has been undertaken in this field, and each individual design step meanwhile means to manage an overload of information and requirements, which are often contradicting, under pressure of time. The applied research approach presented in this paper proposes an effective and practically applicable and extendable DFE-method, which is mainly based on an environmental classification of parts and components of electronic products. This classification is used for the generation of a relevant set of DFE-requirements valid for a certain part or component. It will be avail able as a computerized tool, which helps the designer to minimize the expenditure for the consideration of environmental issues. First results for communication products will be presented at the end of the paper.