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Process Technology Appnote

1.0 Introduction

Process technology is fast becoming critical to DoD and industry due to its pervasive nature in product life cycles as shown in figure 1. Process technology is a key enabler for an organization's capability to add value to its products over it's life-cycle. Process technology/toolkits will provide an integrated environment to understand, analyze, and automate life-cycle processes. Improved design processes and process technologies are key contributors to the RASSP goals of 4X improvements in cost and cycle time. To compete in today's environment the organization, it's tools, and it's culture need to shift from a functional mindset to a process mindset.

Figure 1 - 1: Process Technology Impacts all Life-cycle Phases of a Product.

In order to completely exploit design technologies and skills of the design teams the following is required:

Product life-cycle process must be clearly understood.
Process status must be clearly visible to everyone in the design team such that they understand the relevance, impact, and importance of what they do on the final result.
Process and product information is seamlessly integrated.
A clearly defined continuous process improvement strategy is put in place and acted upon.

The RASSP program developed approaches to assist organizations in addressing these needs. These approaches include a strategy for integration of process and product models, and representation of the combination as reusable segments in a standard format (IDEF). RASSP process models developed specifically for the signal processing and electronics domain also serve as reusable templates which can be customized and applied to multiple organizations and programs.

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Approved for Public Release; Distribution Unlimited Dennis Basara