Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1114420
30 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I MAY 2019 Feature Interview by the I-Connect007 Editorial Team We recently spoke with Altium's Craig Ar- curi about his views on design and manu- facturing rules. Craig has experience running both design and manufacturing companies, so he has a fairly circumspect view of constraints from both sides of the product realization pro- cess. In this interview, Craig details some of the challenges with setting and managing hun- dreds of often divergent design and manufac- turing rules, and how both design and manu- facturing constraints need to evolve to better serve all of the stakeholders in PCB design. Andy Shaughnessy: Craig, there seems to be a lot of disagreement about design and manu- facturing rules, and it seems that there's not much agreement on best practices. It's very fragmented, and everyone does design rules their own way. As an EDA tool company guy, what are users asking you all for regarding de- sign rules? Craig Arcuri: Let me give you a different perspec- tive. Of the last three companies I ran, one was a design company that did engineering design and used CAD tools to create data that was then passed on to manufacturing. Although we tried to care, and said we cared, we really didn't wor - ry about what happened after we sent the data out because that was somebody else's problem. Then it was poetic justice that my last two com- panies were manufacturing companies that had to deal with those folks who didn't really wor- ry about what happened after the handoff to manufacturing! You know the phrase "poop rolls downhill." Well, the manufacturing folks are pretty close to the bottom. At the end of the day, the en- gineer and layout person have done their job, and a big pile of data comes down and lands on manufacturing. My job is to make a physi- cal thing in less time with less money at a high- er quality than is probably reasonably possi- ble given the pile of poop that I was given. Over the course of the last 10 years, I've seen 200–300 unique customers per quarter send the data to the manufacturing people, from the perspective of being close to the bottom. Some of the data comes from companies like Google, Tesla, Intel, and Microsoft. You might think that those companies would provide pris- tine data and that the design rules would be absolutely well-defined, followed, and imple-