Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1053050
NOVEMBER 2018 I DESIGN007 MAGAZINE 19 Let's say you live in Phoenix, Arizona. You grab the kids in the morning and take them to school. Then, you pick them up, take them out to the soccer game, park the car in the sun, and when the soccer game is over, you turn the air conditioning up full blast and drive them off to an ice cream place. You take them in for some ice cream and a hamburger while the car sits in the sun and gets all hot. You come back out, throw on the AC on full blast again, drive to the grocery store—you see where I'm going with this. There's no longer a gentle one-per-day cycle; The cycles occur at an extremely rapid rate with multiple cycles—four, five, six, or seven—per day for the electronics inside the cabin of an automobile. It's not a smooth ramp rate; it's very jagged, which exercises the solder joints even more. What we've been able to show in our modeling work is that modest changes in the X and Y CTEs of the circuit board—for example, going from a 16 to a 13—can double the life of solder joints for certain BGA parts. Holden: Would you call this intuition a skill? Brown: It's to be aware that your intuition, for example, would realize that a modest change in X, Y, and CTE of a board wouldn't make all that much a difference in the life of a solder joint. In fact, it makes two times the difference. For an infotainment automobile manufacturer, that could mean the difference between meet- ing the requirements of the top automotive customer and failing. Holden: I'm interested in the essential skills that you have to develop after college, or the things that they don't teach you in college but are still essential. If we step back into something more basic, how would you define the skill of intu- ition of the artistic part of engineering? Brown: I'll leave you with this final thought, which is rules versus tools. In the old days, we had design rules. We had a separate set of design rules for medical, avionics, industrial, automotive, and consumer products. Those worked very well when the change of pace was more sedate; today, with shrinking geometries and shorter development lifetimes, we need to make the transition from rules to tools. There's a variety of tools out there—our Sherlock reliabil - ity physics modeling software is only one—but it's up to design engineers to know what rule and tool to apply under different circumstances. Holden: I think I've found another skill—rules versus tools. Matties: Thank you so much for spending time sharing your wisdom with us, Dock. We greatly appreciate that. Brown: My pleasure. DESIGN007 by Barry Matties, I-CONNECT007 At the recent AltiumLive event, we had a chance to meet a few of the young designers of our industry. While we spent time asking some of the seasoned designers what advice they would give to a young designer, I took a few minutes to ask Tyler Middleton, a young designer working at Lyft, what advice has he been given that has been the best or most helpful so far. Here's what Tyler had to say. "I'm fairly new to the industry, but in the time I've been here, I've had a lot of people tell me to collaborate," said Middleton. "Collaborate, collaborate, collaborate—work with fabricators, mechanical engineers, etc. I'm still new, but I try to do that as well as I can. It's useful advice." New Designer: The Best Advice I Have Been Given