Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1190860
DECEMBER 2019 I DESIGN007 MAGAZINE 79 manufacturing, parts may have to be singulat- ed first or partially assembled then singulat- ed. The order of operation required based on the parts that need to be installed can get re- ally challenging. Again, we came to SEP be- cause we couldn't create individual bare flexes and bond metal to them on our assembly lines. Alignment and other matters make it too com- plex and time-consuming. If high-tech peripherals are required to be in- stalled onto this flex board, we must ask our- selves: Are we considered the experts? Do we want to invest and become the experts? In many cases, no. And in this particular case, SEP proposed a solution that appeared to be much more desirable from a time-to-market viewpoint. Oftentimes, PCB flex fabrication and assembly are best done under one roof. They not only manufacture the bare flex, but they do the assembly work as well. Martindale: Yes, and that's what we look at when we talk to customers. With your specif- ic application, I can deliver you the flex circuit with a metal-bonded piece on it and guarantee that work; however, if we look at building out the entire solution for you, we may be able to help by assembling the parts in a lower-cost region, owning the quality of the parts and saving you more money over trying to do that in the U.S. Dack: And that just goes back to my point: Sometimes we must admit we need the servic- es of experts because we are not. Martindale: Right. For our size company, a lot of what we do in the flex circuit world has niche applications. For instance, on the med- ical side of the industry, there are small flex circuits with mini cameras being mounted on them that are going onto the ends of very small, complex devices. Your application was a perfect fit because when we looked at it, we saw that we could build the flex circuit, get it delivered, and do the full assembly side of it as well as test that solution for you. With our so- lution proposal, you get a fully tested assem- bly coming in. You can count on it being right because you have one supplier that's not only doing your circuit board and the assembly side of it, but they're helping you out on the de- sign side as well. What tends to happen when you're buying the circuit from one company and then you're doing the assembly with an- other company, is that you lose the integrity of the engineering data. The strategies critical to defining which best practices to employ for design for low cost and design for manufactur- ability can become blurred. Shaughnessy: What's your background, Guy? Martindale: I graduated in 1997 with a chemi- cal engineering degree and went to work for a PCB manufacturer called Zycon. Through mergers and acquisitions, Zycon became Hadco, which became Sanmina, and then Sanmina-SCI. I spent about eight years in various process engineering roles within the circuit board industry, transitioned out of that, and went to work for an OEM; there, I mainly worked on the assembly manufactur- ing side of it, but I spent seven years integrat- ing design and software engineering for DFM and test over to the manufacturing side for that business. That OEM company eventually got acquired, and I decided it was time to move on, so I went to work for my supplier I'd been working with for six years, who happened to be SEP. I start- ed working directly for them, supporting cus- tomers in the United States. Guy Martindale shows off some of SEP's flex circuits at the PCB Carolina show in November.