Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1007258
30 FLEX007 MAGAZINE I JULY 2018 applies and see if they have a well-accepted practice for whatever I'm trying to do. Shaughnessy: Sure. People criticize the stan- dards process and say that by the time a stan- dard comes out it's kind of out of date, but at least you know that it's buildable anywhere. Schulte: I'm with you there. You can push and do things that the standards say you shouldn't. We've worked with fab shops and assembly shops where we'd send a design, and their initial thought is, "I don't know if we can build that." We'll work with them a little bit and we usually can get it to where it's buildable and reliable. Shaughnessy: You medical folks have to deal with FDA regulations, right? Schulte: Yes, the FDA and ISO 60601 guidelines. That's the most influential standard that we're designing to. Any time we do a new product, it goes through a very rigorous test- ing and certification process to meet all those FDA and ISO standards. We also pursue the CE mark for all of our products That's another set of standards that we have to hit, and it seems like every country has their own regulatory system we must comply with, and that's a lot of work. Hats off to our regulatory department. Shaughnessy: Right. How many PCB designers and EEs do you have? Schulte: There are two PCB designers includ- ing myself. For the longest time, Shawn was the only designer at Cadwell, but he was starting to get overloaded as we were push- ing to keep releasing products, and so they br ought me up and trained me, and so now we split those designs up between the two of us. For EEs, it's a pretty lean crew. I think we're running with seven people who are design engineers of different capacities. We have four dedicated circuit design engineers, two guys who do firmware, and then another guy who bounces around in between all of that. We shift around to whatever project needs the most attention at the time or whatever the biggest priority is. So many engineers will get locked in on a project and they stay on that. I person- ally bounce between stuff constantly and just try to keep things moving and do whatever the engineers need to progress. Shaughnessy: Well, it sounds like a cool place to work. Your headquarters are in Washing- ton? Schulte: Yes, we're in Kenne- wick, Washington and we do the design, manufacture, ser- vice and all the support out of the same building there. Shaughnessy: When you say manufacture, are you talking about assembly? Schulte: Yeah, assembly. We order all the com- plicated bits, the PCB assemblies and any injection molded parts and things like that. We'll have those sent to us. But for the overall assembly, we have a full-time production staff and we build all of our equipment. We test our boards and test our equipment and build it up here in our facility. Shaughnessy: The only thing you send out is the fab then? Schulte: Yeah, the fab is the only part that's not happening in our building. Whenever we can, we try to use local sources. We use an injection molding shop here in town that does a great job. Most of our PCBs come out of Westak in Forest Grove, Oregon. They're a great shop to work with, they have great feedback from their engineering staff and they're only a three-hour drive from here, so if there is ever an issue we can drive over there. It's a lot easier to build things when you speak the same language and Jarrod Schulte