Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1111672
44 SMT007 MAGAZINE I MAY 2019 Johnson: What makes for a well-prepared cus- tomer? Is there something qualitative that helps you out? Benson: There is. To a lot of engineers, man- ufacturing is kind of like a black box—it's a mystery—and many feel like once they hit save for the last time, then it just goes off into some magic land and comes back. Johnson: Kind of like the printer on your desk; it just works. Benson: Exactly. A well-prepared customer knows that this is very difficult for them and us. We signed up for it, but it's a very diffi- cult job. A well-prepared customer is also curi- ous; they want to know what we're up to and are willing to communicate quickly and think through and help us solve problems creatively. Having an interest in what we're doing and what's happening in manufacturing is critical. Johnson: Can you tell me one of the success stories? Benson: Not long ago, we built a badge for a trade show. The trade show organization came to us and asked if we wanted to build it for them, and they would give us some publicity. We gave them a pretty good discount, but we also treated them as a regular customer. So, they sent us their design, and somewhere in the pro- cess, they realized they weren't finished with the software yet. So, it was an end product—not a prototype anymore—because we build 300 to go to the open hardware conference. We had a hard deadline and could not miss that. They didn't have a test or programming fixture for us. We found a problem in the first two or three that ran through the line, so we stopped because we don't want to build 300 of them with issues. I was directly involved in this because we were doing some sponsorships with them, and I thought we were going to miss the deadline. We had blown transistors and had other prob- lems on the first two boards I powered up, but they kept in touch. They finally sent me a pro- gramming fixture that I was able to use, and through a process of elimination, we found out that there was not a problem with the physical design. The programming fixture wasn't ready yet, and without the fixture, the way we pow- ered up the board essentially caused a prob- lem. We were just guessing at how to power up the board, so I blew up three transistors on three boards. Then, when they sent us the pro- gramming fixture, we were able to verify that the design was good and successfully build the rest of the badges. Johnson: Designers talk about concurrent engi- neering. Once you move over to manufac- turing, it's pretty sequential. We engineering concurrently but manufacture sequentially. However, in your story, there was some con- currency between engineering and software and the hardware to make this project work, and it did. Benson: Right. In theory, if all of the data is accurate and the design is good, it's essentially a hands-off process, and everything happens automatically. But there are issues in about 70% of our jobs. Johnson: What's the most common thing that goes wrong? Benson: Open vias in surface-mount pads where the solder gets sucked down into the via, and you don't have a good connection. Johnson: So it's design issues on the board. Benson: Correct. We have clearances where components are too close together or too close to the edge of the board. Footprints are another Having an interest in what we're doing and what's happening in manufacturing is critical.