Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1047182
22 SMT007 MAGAZINE I NOVEMBER 2018 our customer base in Class I and Class II, from the FDA perspective of medical devices. Las Marias: Kaspars, earlier on you were mentioning that when customers come to you with designs that are not manufacturable, you help them with modifying those in such a way that they will be easier to manufacture and assemble, right? Fricbergs: Yes. We offer both assembly and test. We offer DFA services, for example in a PCBA, that can help to make it manufactur- able. We're able to review pad sizes and pad geometries to make sure they're appropriate for the components that will be placed in those locations. We'll look at panelization of PCBs to make sure we can build them efficiently. We'll look at the mechanical design, if we're looking at a box build type up of product, which Vexos produces as well. We provide PCBAs for the medical device industry as well as producing complete func- tional assemblies for our customers. We'll look at the integration of any displays or boxes, plastics, metals, hardware, things like that. We'll look at the integration of those to ensure that we can manufacture them and meet the requirements that the customers require. If there are any special tolerances, we have to make sure we can actually meet those. One of the items that I brought up before was in terms of the time to market. One of the important things in medical devices or any device manufacturing is the ability to prove out a device through prototype and phased in production. In other words, a structured new product introduction, or NPI, process, which Vexos has in place. One of the challenges is that sometimes, a customer's time to market is so critical that they're really trying to compress that portion of it. But we feel, and I feel, that this aspect of it is critical; to be able to prove that a device is manufacturable, so we can provide consistent results to our customers once we've reached the production phase. Figure 2: Layer-by-layer composition of the lab-on-a-chip.