By Stefan Tamme
Integrated System Design
Posted 12/05/01, 03:44:51 PM EDT

It started as a discussion at breakfast in early February and resulted in a new product idea completely documented on a set of napkins. Seems that the marketing guy and the chief technical officer for a major appliance company were having breakfast when the CTO remarked that her toast was burnt. She also surmised that it wouldn't be that hard to develop a toaster that, through a clever combination of sensors and signal processing, would recognize when toast was close to burning and would deliver perfect toast, every time. A quick napkin calculation confirmed that the total available market for the Smart Toaster was . . . well, really big.

The CTO left the cafeteria with napkins in hand and shortly thereafter concluded that perfect toast could be created through real-time control of heater elements whose current would be regulated according to an equation with no more than five parameters. All the Smart Toaster operator had to do was to provide the ambient air temperature and relative humidity, the starting temperature and moisture content of the bread, and the desired "toast index of doneness" (a dimensionless number in the range 0.0 to 1.0, with 1.0 indicating charcoal).

She took her equations back to the marketing guy. They discussed the salability of such a device and rapidly came to the conclusion that unless the product had "Internet Ready" and "Automatic Crumb Tray" stamped on the outside, they would never get the project funded. A few more napkins, a wave of the magic funding wand, and the design was ready to hand off to the implementation team.

By mid-April, the engineering manager concluded that he lacked the engineering resources to deliver the Smart Toaster by Christmas. But his team rapidly realized that it could outsource the design of major components from several independent semiconductor IP providers and then glue it all together with software. The team selected providers for the central control processor, the DSPs and the networking core, and set to work.

By June, the design review board was astonished at how rapidly the team had put together a working model of the components and how each had performed its basic task flawlessly. At its first meeting in July, the board declared the Smart Toaster a reality (even if flying toast sometimes hit the dog and the whole project was still in big chunks on a lab bench). It was time to go for a full-up integration.

On Nov. 1 the first truckload of Smart Toasters left the manufacturing facility, and the champagne flowed. The Smart Toaster broke sales records and contributed significantly to the nation's Toast National Product. The project had gone to production on time, sales had met its goals and the company's stock had performed as expected. But on Dec. 26, its help center was inundated with angry calls.

On Jan. 3, the bruised team members returned to work, their hopes dashed forever by the stunning success of their competitor's Smart Blender.

All of the customer problems with the Smart Toaster production model were eventually traced back to bugs in the controlling software.

The wireless toast server connection had failed to run in the final version because of limited processor memory whenever more than one piece of toast was inserted. Also, using the bar code scanner to select the bread type had caused the toaster to unceremoniously reset. The reboot took a full 3 minutes, leaving users without instant toast gratification. The engineering manager's final report would make clear that the failure was due to a lack of early integration testing of the toaster's OS. The software development team concluded that it had desperately needed a cycle-accurate modeling and simulation capability early in the process.

The CTO and the marketing guy met again in early March and grimly reread the e-mail about their company's Chapter 11 filing. Stirring his coffee, the marketing guy sighed, "I guess we're toast now."

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Stefan Tamme is vice president of marketing and sales at Axys Design Automation Inc. (Irvine, Calif.).

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12/1/01, Issue # 13150, page 44.