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PCBD-Sept2017

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12 The PCB Design Magazine • September 2017 by I-Connect007 Happy Holden has been involved in DFM for over 45 years, since he first started working at HP and optimized their PCB design and man- ufacturing processes. Naturally, for this issue, Barry Matties and Andy Shaughnessy made it a priority to get Happy's thoughts on DFM, and what true DFM entails. Andy Shaughnessy: Happy, why don't you start by telling us about your position on DFM, and why true DFM, to you, means that PCB design- ers and engineers should utilize predictive en- gineering. Happy Holden: If you use the term "predictive engineering," you're not going to get much recognition, because that's a term I use. What most people consider design for manufacturing, or DFX, is software that finds errors in design. Especially in the CAM tooling put out by Valor, the DFX software scans through that and finds what's cautionary and that all requirements are met. That's all done after the fact. For me, DFM was introduced when HP took up DFM. It was kind of invented by Profes- sors Peter Dewhurst and Geoffrey Boothroyd. Anyway, DFM and DFMA (design for manu- facturing and assembly) were really invented by these two American professors in New Eng- land. They wrote a book about it, Product De- sign for Manufacture & Assembly. It later became software. Their whole philosophy centered on ways to figure out how to do it right the first time. Their book is about the nature of performance during design that allow you to decide if this is going to be easy to assemble. I think the more important component, which Hitachi and the Japanese took it up, was whether the product could be built by automation. That's really sig- nificant what Hitachi did with the philosophy. They not only took the 'do it right the first time' approach but then asked how they could do it simple enough that robots and automa- FEATURE INTERVIEW

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