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22 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I AUGUST 2023 ere's been a lot of talk lately about digital twin and its use in PCB fabrication and assem- bly. Manufacturers have been quick to get onboard the digital twin train. But what about PCB designers and design engineers? Can the front-end folks benefit from digital twin? We asked David Wiens, Xpe- dition product manager for Siemens Digital Industries Soware, to weigh in on this topic. He's been involved with digital twin for years, and he explained what digital twin can poten- tially offer to PCB design, and why he believes designers have been using digital twin for decades, whether they realize it or not. Andy Shaughnessy: David, let's start by sharing your thoughts on PCB designers and digital twin. What exactly is a digital twin? Designers have always been working with twins of what is manufactured. You know, even designers working with mylar tape had a twin; it was just a physical twin. Since then, we've moved to digital twins and steadily increased the fidelity of that twin. Originally, it was just digitizing, and there was no intel- ligence. I came all the way from Intergraph, and we started with a mechanical design sys- tem. We were digitizing artwork in a mechani- cal environment, and it didn't have much electrical intelligence. Now, there is a lot of intelligence that comes along with the digital twin, and that enables the engineering team to make much smarter decisions. We wrote a series of columns on digital transformation for Design007 Magazine that ended December of last year 1 . Feature Interview by the I-Connect007 Editorial Team