Design for manufacturability

Design for manufacturability, DFM, also called design for manufacturing, is the engineering practice of designing a product so that it costs less to make and is easier to make, two aims that are often intertwined. Factors that affect manufacturability include the type and form of the raw material, dimensional tolerances and secondary processing such as finishing. DFM applies broadly but differs by manufacturing technology. For printed circuit boards it produces design guidelines that take account of the capabilities of the manufacturing industry so that probable production problems are caught at the design stage. For integrated circuits it is a set of principles and techniques, built around foundry design rules, process variability, yield optimization and reliability, that help designs move into high-volume production with good yield. For computer numerical control machining the goal is lower cost, which is driven by time, so designers aim to cut machining time, set-up time, programming and fixturing, noting that each extra flip of a part to reach another side adds set-up and load time.