Some points. nearly everyone misses the difference between internal schedules and external schedules.
In closed companies you never publish the Internal schedule. Announcing the future product kills the present product. You wait until the cake is fully baked, then you deliver it. Nobody sees your internal slips. Nobody sees the nasty bug it took forever to find. nobody sees the struggle and the hard work. They see the final product. and it is always "on time." At Openmoko we choose to do things differently. Everyone on the outside sees the sausage being made. heck they help make the sausage!. Hard core engineers get this. It's very intimidating to have people watch your day to day struggling. It would be easy to be closed and announce new products only when they are finished. We choose a different path. specific questions about PVT. First DVT parts must complete testing. DVT testing is comprehensive. the device is expected to pass. question about A5 and A6. The difference between a5 and A6 is yield related. I don't have the specifics of the change order. An A5 will function exactly like an A6 does. It is Yeild only. sample A6 PCBs are coming into the factory end of march. How long will PVT take? On paper, if everything works according to NOMINAL schedules, then we would schedule 2-3 PVT runs ( run, test, tweak, run,test,tweak, run,test,tweak) If my product were the only product we built and if all tests were nominal, that would take a couple weeks. Then comes production. This too needs to be scheduled. If I guess at this stage I put huge pressure on engineering when they are trying to perfect this device. what is the point in that? The next significant Milestone will be the first PVT run. I'll update folks when that happens -----Original Message----- From: Michael Shiloh [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, March 19, 2008 11:25 AM To: List for OpenMoko community discussion Cc: steve Subject: Re: Neo Freerunner manufacturing status Hi Ian, Since I'm in California and the factory is in China, it's a little difficult for me to know exactly what the plan is and where there are concerns and weaknesses. As far as I can tell there is some concern that the yield initially may not be as high as we would like, and that some tweaking will be necessary. Until we manufacture a trial run, we won't know whether tweaking will be necessary or how extensive this tweaking needs to be. So, sadly, I don't know how long PVT will take and have no timeline. Perhaps those of you with more mass-production manufacturing experience can speak from your experiences. Michael ian douglas wrote: > Hi Michael (and Steve), > > I'm surprised nobody has asked yet: > > I know Michael himself has admitted that Openmoko has been historically > bad at estimating delivery dates, but is there *any* chance on getting > an updated timeline now that we have this news about the A5/A6? > > IE: How long can we (reasonably) expect the design update from A5 to A6 > expect to take? Will the PVT take a week? Two weeks? How long will final > production take to ramp up and start seeing units make their way to > shipping departments? > > Ian > > Michael Shiloh wrote: >> Hi everyone, >> >> I just received a status report from our VP of Marketing, Steve Mosher: >> >> >> The Freerunner design is currently staged to go through Production >> Validation Test (PVT). The hardware design A5 is, we believe, solid. >> We are updating this design to A6 to maximize production yields. >> >> The purpose of PVT is to make sure the yield is high enough, and to >> make sure the manufacturing and testing process is smooth and efficient. >> >> Steve also welcomes direct contact from you. He can be reached at >> [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ OpenMoko community mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community
