Motorola

Conquering the Brave New World of Wireless Communications

Motorola Masters the Benefits of Stereolithography
As one of the world's prolific product developers, Motorola, Inc. utilizes stereolithography as a bottom line business tool. Since 1989, when Motorola installed its first stereolithography apparatus (SLA), the electronics giant has produced a 10x reduction in cycle time, cut production tooling costs by an estimated $2 million a year, and revolutionized the interplay between product teams.

A Voyager II astronaut transmits to Earth. A police patrolman calls for back-up. Joey pages his Mom at work. The corporate dealmaker clinches the contract from his cellular phone. What do they all have in common? -- Motorola. From personal pagers to cellular phones, from automotive, defense and space electronics to semiconductors and microprocessors, Motorola connects the world in a boundless network of radio waves. Since 1928, the company has stood at the forefront of technical innovation with a vast array of products that enhance the quality of life for consumers and businesses worldwide. Still, after nearly 70 years, amidst an explosive Information Revolution, Motorola continues to pioneer new products with a steady hand and creative eye. But now, the work must be done at a faster pace, lower cost and with higher quality than ever before.

Against All Odds
True to its reputation as a forerunner of advanced technology, Motorola benchmarked stereolithography (SL) in 1989. However, the real litmus test came in 1991, when Rob Connelly, Senior Mechanical Engineer in Advanced Manufacturing Technology, Product Prototyping Center, working in concert with the Land Mobile Products Group in Plantation, Florida, used the process to engender a new line of popular HANDIE-TALKIE® radios.

Named the VISAR™, this portable two-way radio originated as a bundle of loose specifications in an engineer's head. The project team had only three weeks before top management planned to review launch feasibility at one of Motorola's annual technology review meetings.

No one expected what happened next. Dave Karl, Staff Designer, created the design in Pro/ENGINEER®, and Connelly quickly built the model on their SLA 250, installed the prototype circuit boards within the model, and assembled the "complete working demo unit" in SL. The live transmission was flawless. The SLA model "looked so good" that top management approved the VISAR launch on the spot. The result? VISAR catapulted Motorola into a new market niche in two-way personal communications, and inspired the purchase of a second SLA 250.

Quest for Accuracy
Time considerations aside, Connelly emphasizes that part accuracy is also a unique advantage of SL. "For Motorola, the vast majority of end parts are plastic injection molded; they're small and packed with tiny, complex features. We must achieve accuracy levels of +/- 0.002 to 0.003 inches. Our day-to-day SL part building accuracy falls within the 6 process widths of our injection molding vendors, and these represent the tolerances to which we design our products. his means that when a designer has tolerance problems with SL parts, he will likely have problems in production as well, and he had better re-think his design."

Accuracy is the lifeblood of this quality-minded company. The first winner of the Malcolm Baldridge Quality Award in 1988, Motorola accepts nothing less than 6 standards, a rigorous statistical process used to approach product perfection. SL fits into this quality culture like a VISAR in a shirt pocket.

At one point, Connelly faced a VISAR snap-fit design that stressed the end-use plastic materials to its extreme limits. After running a series of manual calculations, he knew that the exact geometry of the snapfit would be influential. In only two days, he prototyped the snap-fit, tested it, and, when it held fast, knew the production parts wouldn't break either. SL also made it possible to reach wall thicknesses of 0.060 - 0.080 inches and final accuracy of +/- 0.003 inches.

Designers are perfectionists. Often Dave Karl is absorbed in his computer, zooming through a design where "it's easy to get lost in the idea and misjudge dimensions." Radius edges may appear more rounded. Ribs may look like they match the parent material but in reality do not. Karl depends on the SLA for a "good reality check on creativity, and to get feedback sooner so I can make changes and move forward."

Bravo! No Hard Tooling
In the competitive race to introduce new products to market, the act of balancing time against accuracy and cost challenges every manufacturer. Motorola has elevated cost avoidance to a fine art. No one knows better than Randy Pennington, Senior Mechanical Designer for the Paging Products Group at Boynton Beach headquarters.

Pennington is in the exceptional position of being both a product designer and an SL specialist. He understands the natural affinity between product development and SL. Recently, he created a "snubber pad" to be sandwiched between a receiver and decoder board in the new BRAVO EXPRESS® personal pager. The project was replete with form, fit and function issues because so many small complex shaped components had to fit the housing.

Using SL, Pennington created the parts in Unigraphics® software and assembled a working test unit in a day. Since the process is so "instantaneous," he did all the iterations desired in one-day turnarounds until he optimized the design to his complete satisfaction.

Pre-SL, Pennington would have had to redo hard tooling for each successive iteration. Welding and machining is costly and time-consuming. Assume a $50,000 initial tool cost, plus $3,000 for each of the seven part-building iterations done for the snubber pad, then factor in the expense of each design change, Penning and the BRAVO EXPRESS team ended up saving Motorola over $100,000 on the snubber pad alone. Better yet, the success of BRAVO EXPRESS has been stellar --with millions sold to date.

2 to 1 Return on Investment
Connelly, and his Advanced Manufacturing Technology Group, is chartered to foster widespread usage of rapid prototyping throughout Motorola by establishing satellite centers at other facilities - a task he relishes with so much good news to share. To date, over 8,000 parts have been built at an average cost of only one tenth that spent on conventionally modeled parts. He maintains next day parts delivery (18-20 hours). Where once it took ten days to prototype and machine typically very complex parts, it now takes one day with SL.

Moreover, between the Plantation and Boynton Beach facilities, upwards of $5 million per year is spent on tooling. Connelly estimates that SL is directly responsible for Motorola saving up to $2 million per year off a total investment of only $1 million, thus far. He asserts that "stereolithography has effectively eliminated the need for prototype tooling prior to production release." With all these bottom line benefits, it's easy to see why Connelly's charter is really a crusade.

On the Horizon
Motorola also anticipates the future promise of rapid tooling. "When someone figures out how to do production quality injection molding tools for complex parts in 1-2 weeks, a huge market will emerge to buy up all their capacity," Connelly predicts. "We are working very hard with 3D Systems and their QuickCast Tooling process to progress toward that practical goal."

You can hear the excitement in Connelly's voice as he contemplates a new wave of computer algorithms and process flows for automated toolmaking. In the brave new world of product development, master strategist Motorola can envision the creation of tools in stereolithography with the push of a button.

Hail the conquering heroes.