Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1116895
MAY 2019 I PCB007 MAGAZINE 47 Nolan Johnson: What should the industry do to create a more efficient development process that's faster than what you're doing now but not reckless? Andresakis: We try to hire people with experi- ence in the industry, so we have a lot of good polymer chemists and chemists in general who have been in the field for a while. We need to have a solid pipeline and we want to have a good front end for ideas. Then, we have to go through a process, look through that list of ideas, and say, "Which are the ones that need to continue?" We use a version of the stage- gate process where we do an upfront evalua- tion of the total available market and market trends to figure out if it plays in our area of expertise. We try to screen things ahead of time with a committee and look at what are the right proj- ects to be investing our resources. Next, we go through a series of every increasing detailed steps. We regularly check on the progress. It's always easy to start a project. One of the hard- est things is to kill a project, so you also have to be diligent. If something is going to down the right way, you have to decide if something has to change or if you do something new. It's a balancing act because you want to be very creative and dynamic with the marketplace, but you still have to have a procedure to make sure you're covering all the bases. Weldon: If you look at a materials supplier, a fabricator, and then an OEM, they all do a pretty good job independently. The question is, more or less, how do we get those three to work together to streamline the process of pulling through a requirement down to mate- rial development and up through fielding? And some of that is because everybody comes to the dance, but nobody wants to pick a partner; they're all trying to determine if it's worthwhile to undertake that activity. For example, does a designer who might be an entry-level engineer or an early designer on a project need a new material to solve the problem? Do they need to take that back to a material supplier like a DuPont and make that request? That's a big jump for a 23-year-old, entry-level engineer. At the same time, a company like DuPont doesn't want to then talk to another company at the OEM level, and based on information they re- ceive, say, "I'm going to undertake material de- velopment independently without having that guaranteed pull through." The constant tension between buying and making is always there. However clever I may or may not be, I don't have an answer for that problem. That specific component of the mar- ket interaction is what limits that cycle time. Until there's a real demand with an absolute dollar figure that everybody else can look at and say, "I have to fill that need, and I can make money," I don't think anybody is going to speed up. Unless you have a clever way to break that cycle, we're going to see in the de- sign cycle the way it is. Feinberg: One of the things that we've heard from some of the designers is that they're be- ginning to think that it might be a good idea to talk to some of the material suppliers as they're designing new types of circuitry and devices. Nolan and I asked a couple of them if they were seeing any of that activity, and if any of the designers were reaching out to suppliers. They're designing things that may or may not be possible with the materials that are currently available. Maybe, if they would talk with some of the suppliers on what they want, it might help speed things up. Weldon: We have a steady flow, and more com- munication is always better. I'll take any ques- tion they have, even if they seem trivial. I'd rather have it be asked and answered than to go under speculation. We do see an increase in the questions on circuit boards materials. The constant tension between buying and making is always there.