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12 PCB007 MAGAZINE I JUNE 2019 velop an effective technique to feed back man- ufacturing experiences and wisdom. The data flow is all one direction from DFM. Opportunity Provided by the IC Design Model: Design Planning for PCBs There are five compelling reasons that digi- tal twin is essential to the design of electronic products. First, products have become increas- ingly complex. Not only must products meet increased expectations from customers but they must be environmentally friendly, ener- gy-efficient, and conservative of resources. All of this is done in ever-shrinking product life cycles. Second, minimizing cost is imperative. DFMA has been shown in benchmarking and case studies to reduce assembly costs by 35% [1] and PWB costs by 25% [2] . Third, 75% of the manufacturing costs of a product is determined by all the design draw- ings and specifications. Fourth, in the electron- ic product design process, 60% of the manu- facturing costs are determined in the first stag- es of design when only 35% of the design cost has been expended. As shown in Figure 2, the product definition process includes spec- ifications and partitioning. This is a technolo- gy trade-off analysis of the balance of loss and gain in various domains' performance versus costs. Fifth, a common language needs to be established that links manufacturing to design and R&D. This common language should de- fine producibility as an intrinsic characteristic of design. It is not an inspection milestone con- ducted by manufacturing. Producibility scores form a non-opinionated basis that allows for a team approach that results in a quality, cost- competitive product. The Nature of the Problem The current practice is that design data trav- els in only one direction: toward manufactur- ing. As shown in Figure 3, there is no provision for the capabilities, experiences, and wisdom gained in manufacturing to flow back to the design environment. Hence, many companies use concurrent engineering to bring experi- enced manufacturing personnel into the design process to try and impart some of that wisdom. Unfortunately, these experienced manufactur- ing people are becoming rarer, and it takes far too long to gain that experience. The difficul- ties don't just end there; most of the time, the manufacturer is far away. Under the best of cir- cumstances, the wisdom and experience must be imparted as opinion, and opinions are diffi- cult to defend. This might be a working solution for small, vertically integrated companies with vast ex- perience in manufacturing. But in the last few years, printed circuit packaging has taken a jump in sophistication. Not only is surface mounting now very fine pitch, but ball grid ar- rays (BGAs) and flip-chip and chip-scale pack- ages have entered the picture. Take all of this and the many high-density interconnect struc- tures (microvia or buildup PCBs in Figure 4) [3] available on the market, and design has be- Figure 2: Digital twin contains more than just density modeling; it provides caution on failure-prone components and suitability for testing as well as optimizing electrical performance and minimizing signal integrity problems. Figure 3: Current product data movement.