Smartwatch products are currently trendy and the last release by Apple of the Apple Watch indicates clearly where the trend is going on. We receive more and more request for smartwatch PCB prototyping and manufacturing.
In this post we will describe what are the main challenges brought by the design of smartwatches. Here are some concerns about smartwatch designing.
Smart watch PCB manufacturing and assembly
1. Space and weight constraint
As smartwatch is supposed to be worn on wrist, dimension and weight constraints are an important parameter. The challenge comes when you have so many electronic elements that need to fit into a small casing. When we design a smartwatch we are constantly looking for room space to reduce space and weight by searching the best compromise between space, weight, functionalities and performances.
2. Battery life cycle & chipset selection One of the main concern about smartwatch is battery life cycle or power consumption because contrary to mobile phone, watches has been used for decades already and people are not used to change or charge the battery of their watch every day or every three days.
Everybody try to maximize the life cycle of the battery because this is currently the breaking point by people to adopt a smartwatch. When we design smartwatch we always try to select carefully components and to optimize firmward and software to minimize the power consumption of the device.
In the same time we use the best batteries possible to handle power management.
Choosing the right electronic component during the electronic engineering phase it is absolutely crucial when designing smartwatch because it will directly influence the user experience. A wrongly chosen cpu may consumes too much energy while a not enough power one may generate some lag on the interface. A wrongly chosen chipset may also not allow to have a proper power management in terms of mode selection (standby mode, running mode, sleeping mode).
When we perform smartwatch product development we really spend a lot of time to decide which chipset we are going to use because we know the chipset is the heart of the system and it will directly influence the performances of the product.
3. Antenna and radio wave management Because smartwatches are integrating more and more wireless functions, the presence of antenna is unavoidable. Signal integrity and interference are a big concern when designing smartwatches because in a so small package you don’t have a lot of room for space while you need to make sure all of the antenna can share room in the band to each other.
For perform antenna design and antenna testing to insure the signals are properly received and emitted and don’t provoke bad interactions with other components.
4. Waterproof requirement Most of smartwatches are required to be waterproof and sometimes even IP 67 or IP68. Indeed, people are used to take shower with their watch and some of them even to swim with.
Waterproofing is a challenge in terms of mechanical engineering and in terms of manufacturing. When our designer are performing mechanical engineering for smartwatch product, they spend a tremendous amount of time to optimize the design to make sure all the parts are fitting together and that design qualify for waterproofing, splashproofing or IP67.
5. Display selection Selecting the right display is essential because it may highly influence the user experience. For example, if you don’t pay attention to which display technology you are using, you may end up with a screen display which is unreadable at sun light.
There are mostly two to three types of technologies on the market which are used to design smartwatch : transflective, transmissive and reflective.
You may also be particularly careful about the resolution of the screen and the used interface as some the display should be compatible with your CPU and driver
6. User interaction There is a multitude of OS and RTOS on the market that are used in smartwatch: Android, Android Wear, Linux, Tizen, Apple Watch Os, Nucleus, FreeRTOS.
Some of them are open source and some are not. What does it means? It means that if you develop your own device and if you don’t have access to low level of the system, you may not be able to set up driver for peripherals.
If you are a smartwatch designer, the above items are all considered by you? How is the project going? If you need PCB, find SysPCB to support you, we are Shenzhen PCB manufacturer since 2006. Always bring you reliable PCB supplying.
