Why redesign a PCB?
Every hardware product will eventually reach the same decision point. The same factors will come up again and again in this decision - changing requirements, new customer expectations, supply chain and obsolescence issues, increasing costs...
Should we continue iterating this, or start a redesign?
Most products remain in manufacture and service for many years - this is a cornerstone of a stable and profitable hardware product. Simply put, if you can't sell enough to recoup development costs before you need a redesign, the product will just never be profitable, and if every development cycle brings risks - eventually you're going to lose out.
On the other hand, there are tens, if not hundreds of individual pressures pointing businesses towards redesign, respins and iterations - Each of which brings new costs, new delays, and new risks.
Iteration Vs Redesign
First however, there's an important distinction to be made - though it is a very blurry line - between an iteration, and a redesign. Many engineers would say that it's a sense of scale - how many changes are being made? are we changing any core parts? - however we believe that they are fundamentally different processes.
An iteration is about preserving the product as close to exactly as is - be it a component substitution or a minor feature improvement. Overall, the gist is that you're looking to the minimal amount of change required to just get the thing manufacturable and keep it shipping. This has some risks of its own - every BOM change, component selection, or feature tweak has a risk of not meeting requirements - or worse, especially if it's done in a rush.
Meanwhile, a redesign starts at an earlier step. Rather than trying to do the minimum work possible, the approach is instead to do the optimal amount of work. Eventually, doing tweaks and iterations and component changes every few months (or even weeks!), will take more effort to maintain than the effort used to redesign it. So taking a longer term approach, look at the product as a whole, and evaluate how to continue to deliver it for years to come - and you may only need to do that work once or twice in the lifetime of the product.
Why change at all?
If change introduces all of these risks, why would we ever want to change a product once it's launched? There's hundreds of reasons, however we'll stick to the main ones, and importantly, some of the unavoidable ones.
Component Obsolescence
Tell an engineer a component has gone obsolete, and you'll get pretty much the same universal responses.
The first is a muttered swear. The second is an exasperated "Which one?".
This is a universal problem with all hardware products - each PCB is made up of hundreds (or thousands!) of different parts, from tens of different manufacturers, and each and every one has subtly different requirements. The same component going obsolete on two different products may be a 10 minute BOM change on one, and a lengthy unplanned iteration on another.
When it comes down to it - component obsolescence is a solvable problem, but only with good planning, design practices, and supply chain management. There's a whole other article we could (and will!) write on part selection and supply chain, however for now: with sufficient prior planning, you can anticipate potential issues, and either have alternative parts lined up, select parts with a very low chance of becoming obsolete, or have strategic stock reserves of problem parts.
If however you haven't done the planning and the leg work up front, sometimes a lengthy re-engineering of the product is inevitably the only solution.
Regulatory Compliance
The most severe outcome, that can keep business owners and CTOs up at night, is a formal notice from the likes of Trading Standards or HSE stating that a product is non-compliant and must be withdrawn from sale.
In practice, for well-designed and properly maintained products, this is relatively rare. Regulatory frameworks such as CE/UKCA marking, EMC directives, and product safety standards are typically updated relatively infrequently, with changes published well in advance of enforcement.
This means that, in principle, organisations should have sufficient time to assess impact, update designs where necessary, and maintain compliance. In reality though, this depends entirely on whether regulatory change is actively monitored - something that even the best design engineer teams struggle to stay on top of.
Where this is not managed proactively, compliance updates can become a reactive exercise—resulting in rushed redesigns, failed or delayed certification testing, and unexpected interruptions to supply.
Cost Efficiency
Especially on products with particularly long lifecycles - durable goods, industrial products, or similar - legacy parts can go up in price significantly over time, especially where obsolesce has forced a tick up in price a few times. Over time, designs tend to become less efficient as newer parts or possibilities come around, or different manufacturing techniques become economically viable.
Even a relatively small Design for Manufacture oriented redesign on a legacy design can provide significant long term cost improvements - anything up to 30% - or in some cases even higher.
The practical takeaway
Change is eventually inevitable, frequently expensive, and often comes with risks.
But, controlling that change, and making the most of the opportunity that change presents, allows products to improve and evolve over time, stay in production, and ultimately stay profitable.
How can we help?
Struggling to keep up with obsolete components?
Need to reduce BOM cost of a legacy product?
Or planning an all-up redesign to target a new market?
Schedule a call - no sales deck, no pitch, just support.