Contract Design for Manufacturing (CDM) is a customized service offering delivered by LACROIX to electronic product manufacturers, ODMs, or OEMs.
LACROIX works with manufacturers of embedded and IoT products for the following markets in various application domains:
- Automotive: driver assistance, passenger comfort, passive & active safety, body electronics, chassis, powertrain and engine control, for connected and autonomous ICE/hybrid/electric vehicles
- Avionics (civilian and military, except flight/motor control and weapon systems): cabin and cockpit applications for aircrafts, helicopters, and drones
- Medical/healthcare: non-invasive equipment for diagnosis and monitoring, hospital, and patient comfort equipment, wearables
- Smart home and building: home automation, energy management, security, assisted living
- Smart industries: smart energy, smart agriculture, smart city, smart transport, smart environment, security, industrial automation, test, and measurement
- CDM consists in the full design, industrialization, and manufacturing of an electronic product performed by LACROIX teams. CDM follows an integrated design and manufacturing process, implemented in one of the LACROIX production sites (plants) in France, Tunisia, Germany, Poland for the EMEA market, or with its partner Firstronic in the USA (Michigan) and Mexico for the North American market
CDM includes the following services:
Project management:
- A unique contact (the CDM project leader) from design to serial production is responsible for project planning, product quality, and cost
Product design and industrialization:
- Product and system architecture
- Embedded hardware and software development
- PCB design
- Mechanical and electrical/power supply design
- Design for eXcellence (DfX), covering at least manufacturing, test, and procurement
- LACROIX has 20 years of experience in embedded systems, with 60+ engineers in four design centers located in France and Germany
- Engineers have expertise in analog electronics, digital electronics, embedded software, communication technologies, mechatronics and style/ergonomics, tests and certification
- LACROIX ensures product quality with system reliability evaluation, real-time performance analysis, requirements traceability, qualification, and certification plans
Product qualification and certification:
- Environmental: mechanical shocks, vibrations, physical/chemical aspects
- Electrical: Electro-Magnetic Compatibility (EMC), radio measurements, safety
- Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) analysis
- Acoustic
- Certifications: CE, VDE, UL, etc.
- LACROIX owns internal equipment for full EMC and radio tests in a 6x7x10m Anechoic chamber
Product manufacturing:
- LACROIX has four autonomous plants using a wide range of processes and technologies for delivering the best tradeoff between product complexity, quality, unit cost, and volumes
- CDM services are customized for each customer project. Based upon the available customer requirements and product specification, a quotation is delivered that describes the required Non-Recurring Engineering (NRE) services and associated prices. The quotation also provides a preliminary unit cost analysis for the product based on target production volumes and associated manufacturing Recurring Costs (RC)
- All foreground Intellectual Property (IP) rights are handed over to customers at the end of the project, after full payment of services
- The product defined in the contract is delivered against a defined delivery schedule
- The final product can be a Printed Circuit Board Assembly (PCBA) or a full end-product in its final package as received by the end-customer
