System Assembly, Bring-Up and Validation

The second half of the product development cycle is the board bring-up, which aids the final system bring-up. No physical hardware or system parts are seen until the Gerber release. That is when the bring-up, the actual hardware, and mechanical parts are available for hands-on. The upcoming chapters will discuss more about the manufacturing, power on, testing, and validation of the actual hardware and the system. The pilot system build starts once the system is tested and validated against all the design and certification requirements as per the PRD. The system is deployed with the features list. Pilot systems are usually distributed to internal customers and are restricted to a lab environment until the system passes the regulatory and precompliance testing. Feedback and input from customers are consolidated to fine-tune the system further. Often, there is a separate tool for bug assignment, tracking, and issue resolution.