Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1276973
54 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I AUGUST 2020 this impact turn time? Where does this impact pricing? If I can stay above this spacing, is that going to drastically help manufacturability? And they know the sweet spots of each of our shops. If it's a customer that's doing the manufacturing, we'll work with them up front and say, "We need to get a stackup from your vendor." We may not know the name of the company, but we'll still be working with that vendor up front. We avoid things like guessing at stackups. We tell our customers that we don't want to wait until the last minute to define the stackup. Then, we have fun times where peo- ple might want to support multiple vendors. That's another kind of fun trick. How do we design for that and document that? Matties: We've talked about time, but are you also adding capacity back to your team as well so that you're able to get more throughput? Kolar: Absolutely. Typically, when we do quotes for manufacturing, we're trying to get data that helps things go smoothly downstream— and this is the other thing Dan described—the life cycle that we have on the design side of the process. We ended up building this giant flow chart that's bigger than the biggest whiteboard in our office, which shows our entire life cycle process. It explains where things are jumping in and out for quotes, as well as all the valida- tion and checkpoints; it was an exercise we did for our customers on best practices. Some of the things we do that save us time up front are that collaboration with the designers and the PMs and the fab vendors. The second we have placement locked or mostly locked, and we know the rough size and dimensions, that's the perfect time to get a provisional quote for fab. You don't have to wait until later, and that allows you to call out red flags of, "The stackup isn't possible," or, "What do you want? What are the trade-offs that you can make?" From our side, we want to be able to get quotes back from our fab vendors within a couple of hours. A lot of times, our customers look for quotes from us really fast. We can't be in a business of sending crap data over the fence and having them spend hours trying to understand it back and forth, especially if we're working with an off- shore shop. We don't have the luxury to be inefficient. Even if we don't have com- pleted fab notes, we pre- defined a template to use for getting fab and assembly quotes. I'm the one that did those years ago. I worked with six or seven different fab shops and assemblers and asked, "What would be the best thing for you?" That helps our designers, too. Maybe they don't have the fab notes done yet because a lot of times, the fab notes are kind of near the end; instead, they can fill out this form and give us provisional data that gives the fab vendor everything they need. Then, we get provisional quotes, and then the fab notes help the fab vendor do a final vetting and final quotes. We're able to get quotes back within a couple of hours, usually from our fab vendors, because we know what information they need and don't need. Matties: Why do you think there's such a chal- lenge for designers to get the jobs to fabrica- tors with 100% accuracy, with all the docu- mentation? What's the issue? Kolar: A lot of it is just time. The customer is focused on the base electrical connection. They're focused on how everything looks in the data, not the package itself, and they're like, "Get it out. It's done." They don't care about all the processing time. Matties: But in the end, they're going to wind up spending more time. Dan Warren