An Integrated Information Framework For Multidisciplinary PWB Design Reference Yeh, Chao-Pin (1992) Doctoral Thesis, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta. Abstract Advanced packaging technologies have significantly increased the complexity of the PWB design process. Ever-stringent product specifications and reduced design cycle time have imposed even bigger challenges on PWB designers. The current PWB design process has many that pose barriers to meet these challenges. To better use and manage multidisciplinary PWB design information, an effective information management approach has been proposed and implemented. The proposed approach involves (1) developing an advanced design process modeling methodology, termed IDPMM, to understand, analyze, and optimize the PWB design process, and (2) prototyping an integrated PWB design system, TSET, to integrate and manage the PWB design process. IDPMM consists of three representations that are capable of characterizing the data (entities, relationships, etc.), the process (information flow, hierarchical decomposition, etc.), and the process optimization aspects of the design process. As a case study, IDPMM was applied to a simple exemplar PWB design problem. The case study results showed that IDPMM improved the efficiency of the conventional design process by considerably reducing the number of feedbacks and the design cycle time. For a large-scale PWB design project which involves numerous complex multidisciplinary interactions and feedbacks, the efficiency improvement can be more significant. The thermo-mechanical design aspects were also emphasized in this thesis by incorporating a finite element analysis (FEA) approach into the PWB design process to replace the inferior traditional "build-test-and-design" scheme. TSET is an integrated software infrastructure which employs state-of-the-art framework technology and embraces many advanced information integration concepts (e.g. common database, X Windows, etc.) to provide a concurrent PWB design environment. The TSET concepts were validated and assessed through a case study. Manuscript: order via UMI