Similar to design for assembly, many major electronic manufacturers have taken the lead in developing metrics for evaluation of printed circuit board (PCB) designs. NEC corporation [77], General Electric [78] and Xerox [79] has reported in house systems for evaluating PCB designs and assembly.
O'Grady et al. [8] developed a constraint-based system (LARRY) that addresses various life-cycle considerations during the design of printed wiring boards. They treat the design process as constraint satisfaction problem where the various manufacturability considerations are represented as a constraint network. As designer adds features to the design, the constraint network is evaluated for possible violations. If violations are found, the designer can either select different manufacturing resources or modify the feature that caused the violation. Their approach is computationally intensive: as more features are added to the design, the constraint network grows in size. Their system considers only drilling of holes on printed wiring boards and it is not clear how their approach will handle the computational problems posed by consideration of additional manufacturing operations.
Harhalakis et al. [80] developed a system for manufacturability evaluation of microwave modules. Their system works with a STEP form feature based representation of the design, and uses rough-cut process plans to assign a manufacturability rating on a scale from 1 to 10. Their rating system was developed by interviewing the machinists on the shop floor. Though these ratings reflect difficulty associated with manufacturing, there is no direct correspondence between these ratings and manufacturing cost or time. Their system has a limited capability to perform geometric reasoning to identify interacting features and the effects of precedence constraints, tool changes, setup costs, etc., are not considered in their evaluation criteria.
Other works in manufacturability analysis of PCBs include [81,82,83,84]. These works are mostly for a very specific sub-domain of PCBs. Most of these systems are rule based and because of the very fast pace of technological changes, these rule bases need to be updated regularly. Most of the state-of-the-art research in this area is happening in the manufacturing industry.