Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1285883
SEPTEMBER 2020 I DESIGN007 MAGAZINE 81 Kolar: We've seen some customers that do their own designs as if they have enough money and don't care. We're on a fourth-spin design while the first one is still going in fab because they found some mistake, and they threw it over the wall at us again and said, "Start this one now," and then did the same thing again later. They're leapfrogging because they just care so much about going fast, and their bud- get allows it. This may not be the EE's choice; it's just the company and industry pressure. Warren: I've been doing this for 34 years now. I have one engineer that if he called today, I would hang up the phone. Other than that, I don't really have a mental list of customers. There are a couple of fab shops that I hate working with, and I'll do everything I can to avoid it. Most of the rest that we work with are great. Matties: Obviously, don't name the names, but what makes it so bad to work with these shops? Why is that? Kolar: They don't hold the schedule, and they aren't transparent in any way about the pro- cess that they'll say, "It's booked. We'll have it by this date." And then you hear nothing. When you reach back out five days later, you hear, "We just started DFM, and we just put this on hold." The clock will start over when they resolve it, and you've just lost a week. Matties: When you look for a fabricator, what's the most important attribute? Warren: Communication is huge. As Jen said, I had a pretty complex board before I joined Monsoon. It was a 12-layer stacked via board, and they had an internal process problem, but I learned all this after the fact. The day the boards were supposed to be delivered on a six-week turn was when I got a call, saying, "We ran into a problem, and we had to rerun them." While the problem was known four weeks before, they tried to bring in the date, and when they realized that they couldn't, then they finally called me. Then, they had another problem, and I was supposed to get boards on a certain date. Again, I didn't find out until the day after that the boards weren't coming. By the time we got the boards back, the engineer had thrown them in the garbage because we had moved so far beyond it. If they would have communicated with us what was going on, we might have just said, "Forget it," and not built that second batch that they were doing and saved them the headache of building that second batch. But it was just all lack of communication. Kolar: And it's a lot that's put on the EEs now, not just that they throw it over the wall; it's their schedule, too. Plenty of our customers just assume that any EE should be able to do a layout, that layout is trivial and easy, so there's a lot on their plate. We have many excellent customers, including ones who also have solid processes for design and fab, but in conversa- tions like this, that can get overshadowed by all of the challenges. Holden: It's as if they don't believe it takes a village to raise a child; it takes a team to design a PCB. Kolar: Especially one that's manufacturable. A lot of them don't understand manufacturing. The most complicated, crazy designs we get are from junior engineers who have no idea how a stackup comes together. Matties: This has been great. Well done. We appreciate your time. Kolar: Thank you. We appreciate it. DESIGN007 We've worked with the best shops. We try really hard. We don't just put our partner under the bus.