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PCB007-Aug2018

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18 PCB007 MAGAZINE I AUGUST 2018 Andy Shaughnessy: In light of that, what advice would you have for the designers? Osborn: They need to come visit the board shops, not the contract manufacturers. The designers need to sit down and look at, first, what we can build or what that board shop is capable of, and then let the board shop critique their designs. This lack of communi- cation is the big issue here, and nobody has time or money in their budgets to change this culture. Shaughnessy: Is it just the data coming in? We always hear that most of the time when you get a new customer, the data that comes in is a mess, until you get them trained. Osborn: Sometimes, but not all the time. De- pends on what kind of rush they are in; if they know you can fix it, they'll continue to send it to you that way knowing that you are going to fix it. That's not the right approach, in my opinion. Krick: I'll add to Mark's comments as to what I have seen here. I think designers tend to not live in the real world, and I qualify that be- cause even internally here, when you look at a high-resolution monitor that has a one-mil space or a one-mil line, you think, why can't we do that? Well, the reality is that out in the real world that's not doable. I think, when the designers look at what they're developing, it's based on their theoretical end unit, not neces- sarily what it takes to get there. We've done some pretty crazy stuff here that was pretty far outside of the box. We have some customers that enjoy the feedback and learn from the feedback, but— I've been building boards for years and I know how to build them—for the life of me, I don't know why they do what they do. It would be a benefit to me to see how the designers come up with their designs. I think the same thing is true with the designers and board shops be- cause they don't really have an idea of what manufacturability really equates to. Knapp: Just to piggyback on that, there's no manufacturing tolerance to variation built- in to the high-resolution monitor on a desk. There is manufacturing tolerance built in these boards that may not be understood. Krick: That's a great point. I was just having that dialogue with some of our internal peo- ple here, trying to educate, and even to Kevin's point, the thought is that when you've spent big money on that CNC drill and that drill pro- gram tells that hole to go to X1Y1, that's where you expect it to be. Well, you don't live in that true-position world. There's always some de- gree of variability, and I don't think the de- signers see that either. We've seen designs that have six-mil holes that are spaced on a three- mil grid or something and they don't under- stand why we can't do that. Oh, and it's a 100- mil thick board. Feinberg: I think getting this word out is of great value. Krick: I agree. One other comment I would like to make goes back to being a small shop. We don't have the resources to afford the half a dozen method engineers to be able to take raw data, clean it up, go through designer man- ufacturability rules, go back to the custom- ers, make sure that they know what they've got, make sure we know what we've got, and, oh yeah, "We need the parts delivered in two days." That's kind of where we end up hitting the brakes. If we were talking 20-mil vias, 10 x 10 (line/ space) double-sided stuff, then this conver- sation is a moot point, but some of the jobs that we take, and we've hit it out of the park, take a lot of what I agree with Kevin is trib- This lack of communication is the big issue here, and nobody has time or money in their budgets to change this culture.

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