Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1140547
8 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I JULY 2019 My 2003 Mazda Tribute doesn't look very cool; it's classified as a "cute ute." This car was designed to spend a lot of time in an el- ementary school carpool lane, but it is about as reliable as any car can be. It just goes and goes, and it doesn't break down very often— especially for a car with over 200,000 miles on it (it helps that I telecommute and don't spend two hours each day driving back and forth to work). Everything still looks new, inside and out. It's fun to drive, and it can haul four guitars and a pair of PA speakers with room to spare. It's been paid off for so long that I've been able to put more money away for my rapidly ap- proaching golden years. This was no accident; as the saying goes, "Reliability isn't just an added feature." Every person involved in de- signing and building my car contributed to the car's long-term reliability. Reliability has been in the news quite a bit lately, and as always, it's when something has proven to be unreliable. In 2018, IPC formed the IPC V-TSL-MVIA Weak Interface Microvia Failures Technology Solutions Committee to try to find the root causes of microvia inter- face failures that have been affecting the de- fense and aerospace segments. Members of that subcommittee spoke at the IPC High-Re- liability Forum and Microvia Summit in Balti- more, Maryland, and I was fortunate enough to cover that conference. Now in its third year, this conference has continued to grow with over 100 attendees. No one at the conference ex- pressly blamed the designer for these failures, in case you were wondering. But there are steps that designers can take early in the design cycle to head off trou - ble later. Motorola's Jerry Mag- era and J.R. Strickland have been looking into these via failures for years. In their presentation, they offered a few tips for designers seeking to create the most reli - able board; namely, avoid using stacking microvias. Try not to use stacked and staggered microvias in the same board. Keep the vias as large as possible, and the as - The Shaughnessy Report by Andy Shaughnessy, I-CONNECT007 Reliability Is a Team Sport