Several government agencies and industrial sectors have recognized the need for, and payoff of, investing in the methodologies and associated technologies for improving the product realization process. Within the defense community as well as commercial industry, there are three major needs. First, they must reduce the cost of military products, of related manufacturing processes, and of the enterprises that have to be maintained. Second, they must reduce the time required to realize products while still applying the latest technologies. Finally, they must improve the predictability of process attributes, product performance, cost, schedule and quality. They must continue to advance technology, quickly incorporate their innovations in new products and in processes to produce them, and they need to capitalize on the raw computational power and communications bandwidth that continues to become available at decreasing cost. Sandia National Laboratories initiative is pursuing several interrelated, key concepts and technologies in order to enable such product realization process improvements: model-based design; intelligent manufacturing processes; rapid virtual and physical prototyping; and agile people/enterprises. While progress in each of these areas is necessary, this paper only addresses a portion of the overall initiative. First a vision of a desired future capability in model-based design and virtual prototyping is presented. This is followed by a discussion of two specific activities parametric design analysis of Synthetic Aperture Radars (SARs) and virtual prototyping of miniaturized high-density electronics -- that exemplify the vision as well as provide a status report on relevant work in progress.
