Performing design for environment concurrent with interdisciplinary tradeoff analysis of electronic systems

As the world becomes more sensitive to environmental issues and systems become more complex, the risk of ignoring the environmental impact of a product or process will become intolerable. Unfortunately, design for environment (DFE) activities will be of limited value unless the impact of DFE decisions and other system economic and performance measures (i.e., cost, electrical and thermal performance, reliability, size, etc.) can be concurrently assessed by system designers. This paper presents the preliminary results of embedding energy/mass balance into an existing software tool that performs automated tradeoff analysis for electronic systems. Example results that demonstrate the necessity of concurrent DFE, cost, and performance analysis are presented.