CDR.1 What is a Critical Design Review?
Purpose
| A Critical Design Review (CDR) is a multi-disciplined technical review to ensure that a system can proceed into fabrication, demonstration, and test and can meet stated performance requirements within cost, schedule, and risk. (credit: https://acqnotes.com/acqnote/acquisitions/critical-design-review) |
The Critical Design Review (CDR) is a formal milestone in development projects between the team designing a product and the customer of that product.
The CDR is a formal review and discussion where the design team shares the details of their product design with their customer. The intent is to satisfy the customer of two important things:
- the design team understands the product requirements and goals set forth by the customer, and
- the design team is well-suited to complete the product development through the manufacturing stages.
The customer will ask questions of the design team to assess if these objectives have been met. Dialogue between the customer and the design team might also result in decisions being made for areas where choices or trade-offs must be made. Because the success of the product development is important to the customer, you can expect the customer to provide feedback on improvements to the design. The customer and development team will work together to make trade-offs and design decisions that satisfy the requirements and goals that
Content
A CDR will typically include engineers from all design disciplines (systems engineering, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, software engineering, human factors engineering, etc.). The CDR is about the product design details, how the product is designed, decisions that were made and why, and how the product will be produced. It is not about marketing the product; publicity, sales and marketing are typically not included in such a review.
The CDR should consist of the following elements, not necessarily in this order. However, the following is a good guide for content and order:
Design Requirements & Goals – the requirements/goals as understood by the design team; how are requirements satisfied by this design; which requirements influence design decisions; etc.
Design Functional Description – describe all of the functionality of the product; the tasks and operations that the product can perform; describe the “what”, not the “how”
Design Implementation Details – describe the “how”; from high-level block diagrams to detailed explanations of operation, provide enough detail to show the customer exactly how the design works; this includes design details from each of the disciplines; includes mathematical analysis and even simulations to prove proper operation.
Design Specifications – gives the quantitative (numerical) specifications for the product; power, speed, weight, size, etc.
Risk Assessment – provide analysis of the design risks; what parts of the implementation carry the most risk and could be unsuccessful? Identify plans to mitigate (or reduce) the possibility of this risk and what will be done about it if the risk is believed to be too high.
Examples
An example CDR slide deck from Colorado University Boulder, Senior Projects 2020, https://www.colorado.edu/aerospace/academics/undergraduates/senior-design-projects/past-senior-projects/2020-2021/autonomous-rover, McFarland, Margeaux, 23 November 2020
A BEST Team CDR Example: BEST 2020 Outbreak – MACH Robotics
Summary
A CDR will typically take several days to complete, depending on the product and its requirements.
At the conclusion of the CDR,
- the customer will give the design team a thumbs up or thumbs down on proceeding with the product development, and
- both parties will have captured the areas of design that need more work and how that will be accomplished on schedule to meet the customers needs.