Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1245291
12 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I MAY 2020 that time, I was working my first PCB in the fab shop, which was a six-layer board and hand layout with tape with Mylar paper two times the size. Over the years, I worked in fab- rication on design for a telecommunications company. I co-founded Interconnect Technol- ogy Inc. (ITI) in the early '80s with some peo- ple from Tektronix, where we had a service bureau set up doing the laser blind via drill- ing PCB layout, fabrication and surface-mount assembly. Unfortunately, the company didn't make it, but I made a lot of friends in various groups that scattered out around the industry, and some of them are still around. After that, I went into telecom design and worked on one of the first fiber-to-the-home distribution systems, and then I went back to the board fabrication industry, where I've been there pretty much the last 25+ years. I've been involved in high-end circuit board manufac- turing, run R&D, and was involved with bur- ied capacitance technology when it first came out. It was a radical idea that enhanced the existing decoupling capacitors with higher- frequency plane-to-plane capacitance, which was critical for signal integrity and power dis- Feature Interview by the I-Connect007 Editorial Team Andy Shaughnessy and Barry Matties spoke with Dana Korf, former chief PCB technologist for Huawei and currently principal consultant of Korf Consultancy, about the breakdown in communication between manufacturers and designers. Dana discusses exactly what a fabri- cator expects from a PCB designer, why these expectations are often not met, and the need for designers to make mistakes so that they can learn from them. Andy Shaughnessy: Dana, we're going to talk about expectations and the problems with un- met expectations. Can you give everybody a quick rundown of your background? Dana Korf: I started out post-Vietnam War in the mini-computer industry where we were trying to displace mainframe computers; it was said that you couldn't do it, but at the end of a few years, our machine came out, and we could beat them in some benchmarks. Then, PCs came out and displaced that industry. At Dana Korf: What Fabricators Expect From Designers Dana Korf